One of the oddest things that happened to us over the summer was a massive surge in views of our Vimeo animation projects. Or, more precisely, project.

As on many sites, we can track how many ‘views’ one particular piece has received. So we can tell you for free that for quite a while this animation for the Pew Center was our ‘most viewed’ with 4,000. We thought that was quite respectable.

But only a couple of hundred of people have bothered to watch this animation of the BFI’s logo. Ah well. Such is life.

It’s therefore been quite a shocker to discover that our most watched video is now this stop-frame animation of a Virgin Atlantic 747 being repainted in its new livery. Thanks in part, we think, to links from Brand New and Gizmodo, this piece has now racked up a pretty healthy 172,000 views (and counting).

Amazing.

We have received dozens of logo mash-ups from all over the world following last week’s post. Here is our selection of the best ones so far.

Several people had the temerity to mess with the johnson banks brand, or our logos. Such cheek. The one above is from Stuart Price. Meanwhile look what Chris Jeffreys did to our Shelter logo.

We hope that Chris’s employer isn’t reading this because we got an avalanche of great ones from him.

And this one too. Now, back to work Chris.

A lot of people seemed to have, er, sex on the brain, including Mike Reed.

Here are some sportswear mash-ups from Andy Thorne and Amanda Grace Liu.

Food, drink and er, manga from Leigh Dunks and that man Jeffreys again.

Big Macs and TV? Perfect combination really (thanks to Matthew Robinson).

And to end part two, Obama and O2 (the British phone brand) from Ed, Chris and John at Lost in the Forest. Great stuff.

Will we have enough for a third edition? Feel free to send us more at: info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk

In the meantime, thought for the week is taking a brief vacation. See you in September.

The recent news that the broadcaster BSkyB (who trades as SKY in the UK) is getting all hot under the collar about Skype’s continuing rise in popularity around the world raises all manner of interesting questions. Not least of which being how you can possibly claim to ‘own’ three letters which are patently part of another word entirely.

That set us off, visually speaking, and led to the mashed up logo we offer you at the top of this post and then others - some patently ridiculous, but others, well...

Feel free to send us your own: info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk

Recent trips to the Arabian Gulf on business and pleasure have opened our eyes to Arabic fonts, scripts and calligraphy – an art form we’ve enjoyed and admired but never studied in any detail before.

Probably because of our forays into fusing western typeforms and Japanese scripts (and a current project looking at Mandarin)…

…we’ve found ourselves collecting good and bad examples of attempts to fuse native and western scripts, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

There are obvious examples of western brands with Arabic adaptations that work on pure brand recognition alone – it’s pretty obvious that these say Coca-Cola, McDonalds and STOP, but it’s the colour and shape of the enclosing devices that generally give the game away.

It gets more difficult when using two languages side-by-side - most international organizations opt for the bilingual/coexisting approach, trying to write each word or phrase in something remotely compatible. So here’s the classic bilingual approach…

…or more unusually, western letters rendered in a typestyle designed to ‘look Arabic’.

The above examples illustrate that finding successful bi- or mono-lingual approaches that co-exist happily is more difficult than it seems.

There seem to be various reasons for this. Arabic scripts are based on many essential yet quite different character forms (Kufic, Thuluth, Naski, Riqaa, Taliq, Diwani, and Muhaqqaq) which will probably confuse western typographers. And the rules by which we measure and design ‘our’ typefaces have no directly corresponding rules in Arabic.

Simply redrawing Arabic scripts with western style fonts looks clumsy, but doing the reverse can look just as bad, if not worse.

One of the key differences and challenges, of course, is the two letterstyles reading in opposite directions – there are some examples of designers exploiting the ambigrammic or bilingual opportunities these offer up (such as the ‘art’ logo below  which does read in two languages and the Arabic version of the Los Logos identity) but most appear a little flummoxed by this, and no wonder.

Even one of our favourite examples of ‘smart’ design with Arabic letterforms turns out to be problematic.

This ad, done in London, announced Virgin Atlantic’s Dubai flights – the typography was meant to both say ‘shortly’ (pronounced ‘kariban’) and had been cleverly adapted to look like a plane.

But, because some important accents had been dropped it actually read ‘kariba’ – a nice attempt to fuse language and meaning but one undone by poor grammar.

Paradoxically, use of key typographic elements can almost backfire. Albeit not designed specifically for the Gulf but related, we thought that this proposal to Islamic Aid was a neat fusion of western meaning and ‘rhombic dots’ but we’re still not sure if they are ever going to use it (it was criticized for seeming ‘too Islamic’).

To western eyes, one of the most beautiful aspects of Arabic calligraphy is the ability to twist and turn the letterforms into beautiful forms and shapes, called calligrams.

Whilst these can be beautiful devices, in the hand of modern designers they seem to somehow lose meaning, or struggle to look contemporary. 

Probably one of the highest profile examples is the symbol of TV station Al Jazeera, but to western eyes the calligram is especially hard to decipher (it technically derives from the network’s name written in Arabic and is derived from a golden globe emerging from water).

On a more positive note, better type examples are beginning to appear. Although not universally accepted, yet (maybe because of its cost), only last year Linotype introduced Helvetica Arabic, which to our eyes looks like a good attempt to produce an Arabic typeface with some of the neutrality of the West’s favourite typeface of the last 4 decades.

Many new font families are looking at or adding Arabic versions specially drawn to be compatible with the western typeforms.

And perhaps designers working in the Gulf will be encouraged by designs such as Iranian-born Mehdi Saeedi who continues to show just what is possible with Persian script, reinterpreted for the 21st century.

But if Arabian brands are to reach out to western audiences, designers and typographers both here and in the Gulf need to try a little harder to break through the visual and verbal divide. Once we get there, it should be worth it.

By Michael Johnson

Last week we were a little frustrated that the first 747 in Virgin Atlantic’s new livery could only be photographed on a cloudy day surrounded by Manchester puddles.

But there’s a new phenomenon in our lives - the planespotters. This arrived on ‘Airplane-pictures.net’ within hours (so thanks to Charles022 for that), now you can see what we meant by the metallic red tailfin.

Also, already in cyberspace there’s this full piece of film panning left and right, up and down across the new livery, which isn’t maybe that interesting unless you’re a planespotter yourself, or weirdly interested in plane liveries all of a sudden.

What is interesting (honest) is the piece of stop frame animation below that shows what happens when you paint an aircraft. It takes about 4 days, and costs a heck of a lot of money.

For the eagle eyed amongst you, yes the new identity features on the belly of the plane as well.

We’ve just returned from the official launch of a project we’ve been working on since the beginning of last year: a new livery and identity for Virgin Atlantic.
 
johnson banks were appointed early 2009 to help advise on the airline’s brand, in conjunction with a strategic project on the positioning and values undertaken by Circus. Originally the project concentrated on finding a new and clearer design style for its internal and external communications, then gradually broadened out to include livery and identity. Both verbally and visually, the airline wanted to return to a more confident and pioneering approach, so we were tasked with reflecting this in the design.
 
As the design work began, several key issues emerged.

Firstly, some early livery designs that used the full name ‘virgin atlantic’ very large on the fuselage were very well received – a clear indication that the company wanted to return to calling itself by its full name. Secondly, there were logistical issues with the previous logo and symbol that made use of it problematic. Thirdly, the overall house style that had been in place for over a decade needed a typographic refresh and more consistency, so it could be applied from a myriad applications, from airport banners and bag drop signs, to tiny applications on iPhones and aggregator sites.

So the last 12 months have been spent developing and refining, with Virgin Atlantic’s in-house team, solutions to these key issues – trying hard to retain the essential elements of Virgin Atlantic’s first 25 years and refining them for the future.

The new livery, unveiled today, uses a lighter metallic grey than previously and features a new, thinner and more elegant typestyle for the airline written in purple at a massive scale along the fuselage. The tail has a simplified Virgin script logo within a newly specified highly metallic deep red fin.

The logo itself now reflects the plane – the ‘virgin atlantic’ type being the fuselage, the script logo, the fin of the plane.

The fin symbol itself was the subject of countless design proposals, amendments and discussions – the eventual winner has a much more simplified and elegant form than its predecessor and is placed at the end of the logotype in either the one-line or stacked form.

These design principles will be carried across into all applications, including new identities for the airlines key ‘classes’ (Upper Class, Premium Economy and Economy) as well as all other names and sub brands such as The Clubhouse and Flying Co, etc.

From this point onwards all of the airlines printed and electronic collateral will gradually come in line with the new direction, picking up newly refined colours, typography and art direction styles, and within 2 years 50% percent of the fleet will have been repainted or supplied in the new livery (a delivery of new Airbus A330-300’s will arrive next year).

Here it is on a newly repainted 747. Sorry about the Manchester puddles.

We’ll post more images of how the project progresses and new applications soon.

Just for reference, this is the previous identity.

johnson banks has recently completed the first stages of a rebrand of The Anthony Nolan Trust, which is a register of potential bone marrow donors in the UK.

The old identity used the full charity name (‘The Anthony Nolan Trust’), had a daisy as a symbol (which was unfortunately very similar to several other cancer charities) and were struggling to stand out.

Anthony Nolan was set up over 35 years ago and has a proud history, but they found that awareness among the younger audiences who we need to come forward and join the register – young adults and especially young men - was very low. They urgently needed to reach out to these groups to save more lives.

The new approach simply emphasises what they do: they find matches for leukaemia patients who need a lifesaving transplant. It will help raise awareness of the charity but also about the crucial importance of the work done.

The new identity aims to make it much clearer that they are there to match potential marrow donors to recipients in a life changing procedure. This is illustrated with matching letters, the new strapline ‘be a match, save a life’, and a design approach that emphasises this ‘matching’ through copy and typography.

Here are a few early applications.

One of the challenges faced by the charity is persuading young adults to get involved, and that the initial procedure is minimal. This can now be done by simply spitting into a cup (hence the ‘give a spit’ line below).

Even their official reports and medical documents will be included in the rebrand - here’s an example.

Below are examples of their campaigning work, and a page from their new website.

And of course t-shirts.

For reference, this is the old logo.

johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson was asked to comment in Saturday’s Guardian World News on the design of the new Indian rupee symbol.

Until now, the word rupee has been spelled out, abbreviated to Rs or alternatively to INRs (to differentiate it from some other Asian currencies).

The winning design was selected from a shortlist of five following a nationwide competition.

And our verdict on the new symbol?

‘I think it’s a B or B plus. Most currency symbols follow an established route now - E for euro, Y for yen, now R for rupee. You could argue that a dynamic emerging economy could have gone for something more unusual and got away with it - I think in the end conservative voices prevailed.’

You may have spotted this in the blogosphere already, but in case you hadn’t, johnson banks’ Michael Johnson will be speaking at the inaugural Brand New conference this November.

Other speakers for the event include European design legend Erik Spiekermann, Michael Bierut and Paula Scher from Pentagram New York and speakers from Wolff Olins and Studio Dumbar, amongst others.

There’s a full line up of speakers here, and registration details here. Should be quite a day.

Have you noticed how symbols acquire nicknames?

We’re in the midst of a project for Save the Children which needs discussion about where to put their symbol - but we don’t say ‘where shall we put the symbol’ - we say ‘where shall we put charlie’.

This is because the client calls their him/her symbol ‘Charlie Brown’. And the truth is, we’re not really sure why they call him/her Charlie Brown. They just do.

Before we did this for Christian Aid...

...they had this symbol.

One day we asked about the the abstract figures in the mark - in truth, politely digging a little to see if there was appetite for change.

‘The symbol?’ they said. ‘We call them the two fat slags’. Seemed a little un-Christian to us, but it was no surprise (especially after that conversation) to hear that they were happy to move on.

The work we’ve done for MORE TH>N, the insurance company, contains a more than/greater keystroke within the logo. But rather than say ‘the more than/greater keystroke’ which is of course way too long, they call it ‘the chevron’ (logical really, and much shorter).

When we were helping the UK Government redraw their crest (before, above, after, below) we discovered, partly because of the way it didn't work so well small, that some people called the previous version ‘the squashed beetle’. Harsh.

Away from our work, the NASA symbol is, slightly weirdly, called ‘the meatball’.

Most graphic designers of course love the seventies version, affectionately nicknamed ‘the worm’.

Anyway, we’d like to compile more examples, and we’d like to hear from you.

Send us examples of bizarrely named symbols (and ideally why) to info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk and we’ll do a follow up post as soon as we have a good collection.

It struck me recently that the theory, process and practice of identity change seems to be understood at one level, then completely and utterly misunderstood at another.

There genuinely seems to be a feeling at large that some identity designers (ourselves included) walk into boardrooms with pre-determined, pre-decided solutions mocked up and ready to go. And that we’ll stand there, hands on hips, bottom lips out, ridiculing and cajoling until the poor defenceless client puts their hands up and says ‘oh go on then, do it’.

Now, it’s true that there have been times when a particular poster, or photographic style, or unusual brochure design has needed a bit of ‘steering’ through difficult client waters. But with proper, grown-up identity projects, it’s different. It’s almost certainly naive to present a fait accomplit. You simply can’t ‘bounce’ a client into a decision, usually because there are many, many layers of clients (from initial marketing or design contact, then marketing/design team, then director level, then trustee level, then the board and of course the chairman). That’s a lot of bouncing.

It’s also worth pointing out that major identity projects often require strategic phases before going anywhere near the drawing board. Sometimes graphic designers roll their eyes at this point, but, think about it – if you were running a multi-million pound organisation, wouldn’t you want to check that your strategy and planning was in place, that you were clear where you stood in the market, and were focused on where you wanted to go next? Smart clients know this, and understand that the last thing designers should do at in initial meetings is ‘show a few logos’ – how could anyone possibly understand the issue after a day or two spent on the internet doing a bit of desk research?

Add in a level of research that many clients now insist upon (sometimes in several phases) and you begin to see why, for decades, achieving identity change other than a slight tweak here or there was a tough task.

But more recently, the world of identity has changed – for decades identity equalled logo, which in turn equalled ‘the thing stuck in the corner of the ad’. Now the ‘thing’ has come out of the corner and can take over an entire organisation. The canny clients have realised this. By spending more time on their visual, then verbal brand, and building a whole system around agreed words and then agreed pictures, very successful ideas can be created or evolved in a way that can have dramatic effect on visitor figures or the bottom line, or both.

Perhaps it’s the power of this that puts people’s back ups. Certainly ad agencies are nervous of the power of branding in its newest, broadest sense. Advertising sometimes becomes just a ‘channel’ for corporate strategy, often decided months previously with the help of the design consultant. But equally, more traditionally minded designers are nervous of the change. All of a sudden some clients don’t want to recede in to the background anymore. They want to stand out, they want to search for the unusual, the USP that will elevate them in the eyes of their customers and scare the you-know-what out of the competition.

All of this means, of course, that identity design has to keep moving. It can’t just noodle away in a safe old world of monogrammic solutions, or yet more ‘fairly familiar symbol with type next to it’ solutions, all essentially re-treads of the safe stuff we’ve all seen before. The old ‘sight-gags’ that were designers’ stock in trade for decades might make other designers happy, but might not work anymore. And simply retreating into ‘fallback modernism’ (ie Helvetica or whatever is the new Helvetica-de-jour) often fails as well.

The 21st century client wants stand-out and memorability, not more of the same. And that means stepping out of comfort zones and embracing the new, searching for visual and verbal twists and turns that create unique mnemonics that stick in people’s heads. This could mean logos, or typefaces, or images, or words, or any combination of the above. It could involve solutions that break with our carefully nurtured senses of right and wrong and even dally with, well, ‘ugly’. The Olympics logo was universally panned but now, apparently, has extraordinarily high ‘recall’ in research. Faced with a choice between being ignored or noticed, more and more clients are opting for the latter.

There will still, of course, be times when ‘revolution’ is impractical and ‘evolution’ eventually wins the day. And in retrospect, when our clients have chosen the latter route, we’ve been surprised, and sometimes disappointed, but there’s usually been a strong and irrefutable reason. Dramatic, fundamental and wholesale change isn’t possible, every time.

When it is achieved, major change can be uncomfortable, even unpopular. Anyone even slightly interested in identity design will have noticed that some projects gather more criticism, the more unusual they are. It’s as though there’s an ‘inverse appreciation law’ as regards new identities – the more out of people’s comfort zone, the more it will be panned until the various target markets adjust, then eventually accept and then maybe (just maybe) embrace.

Achieving ‘stand-out’, getting noticed, persuading customers that you’ve changed, all of these things are impossible to achieve if no-one even knows you’re there. If successful identity change really is ‘change made visible*’ then, by definition, invisibility equals ‘no change’. Think about it.

By Michael Johnson

Quoted, I'm pretty sure, from my old boss Wally Olins

One of the first applications of the new identity for the Science Museum has been the collateral for its recently revamped Who am I? gallery which looks at genetics and brain science.

Our visual solution for the marketing campaign was to take a series of pictures of children and adults then ‘de-brand’ them by carefully removing their faces. This creates a pretty arresting and unusual set of images.

In the applications we replace their features with the name of the exhibition then ask additional questions in the circles that float around their heads.

The idea is being applied out onto Underground posters, banners, telephone kiosks, you name it really, including these ‘cross-track’ posters, pretty much the biggest posters we’ve ever done.

In case you’re wondering, the circles/bubbles that float through the posters link directly to the gallery where you can build a ‘bubble person’ of yourself, interact with bubble walls...

...there’s even a bubble mascot.

The gallery itself is fantastic and well worth visiting asap - another tour-de-force by exhibition specialists Casson Mann with graphic back-up from Graphic Thought Facility.

Photography of the faceless family by Jan Masny

johnson banks was appointed at the end of 2009 to work on the Science Museum’s brand and identity.

Whilst the museum is known for its groundbreaking exhibition designs, galleries and spaces, and remains one of London’s most loved museums, there was a sense that it could reach a wider audience, past its traditional family audience. For example, its monthly ‘Late’ nights have been amazingly successful, attracting thousands of twenty-somethings, drawn back to one of their favourite museums on a night when children are safely tucked up in bed.

Coupled with a desire to reach out to a more clearly segmented audience and attract more ‘grown-ups’ the museum briefed us to search for a more sophisticated visual identity, to avoid the usual science clichés of test tubes and mad, white-lab-coated professors, whilst supplying more cut-through. We were also keen to find a visual style that was much more than just a logo and could plant the museum back in the minds of audiences who might have forgotten them.

In identity terms the museum has lagged behind its London competitors – they had a simple wordmark and crest in the 80s which was slowly replaced by the ‘Sci M’ device in the late eighties (originally just meant as a shopping bag). This was dropped a decade ago in favour of a simple typographic solution but this had struggled for recognition, especially in the competitive environment of cultural posters on London’s underground.

After experimenting with several routes, the chosen idea stemmed from research we did on codes, puzzles, patterns and basic digital typefaces, and we found a way to shorten the word science so we could create a grid-like ‘stack’ of the letterforms. We also began to experiment with slightly abstracted letterforms as we noticed that ‘science’ and ‘museum’ were relatively generic words.

When we shared it with the client (and with the public in research) it became clear that people read many meanings into it as they ‘decoded’ the letterforms – some see it as futuristic, some as scientific. One respondent said it seemed ‘binary, modern and classical at the same time’. This is a useful trait for a logo – it means many things to different people without being overly specific about one aspect of science over another, allowing us to use it on a myriad different applications.

From the outset in implementation we used the logo as large as possible, and extrapolated the typeforms into a headline typeface. Early applications see underground posters that feature visitors touching the new logo from behind, or within the poster, and the campaign for the newly redesigned Who Am I? gallery uses a boy and girl’s face that have been ‘debranded’ (we’ll post images of this campaign in a few days).

The Lates posters and communications are to be rebranded with stronger type and a series of images by photographer John Ross.

All the banners on the front of the museum have been replaced, as have the elements in the museum concourse, and this year the new design will gradually work its way through the museum and permeate all of the museums marketing materials, communications, websites and retail products.

Credits:
Photographers:
Brand posters: Lee Funnell
Lates posters: John Ross

Typeface construction:
The Foundry

Apologies for the slight shortage of memorable posts in the last few weeks: we have a whole array of new projects coming out and have been a bit distracted.

First of all is a new identity for London’s Science Museum, which launches tonight. We’ll have more images and applications to show tomorrow and early next week - in the meantime here’s the new logo.

This is an adaptation of the keynote speech given a fortnight ago at the St Brides Design conference by johnson banks creative director, Michael Johnson.

Once, design was all about silos. You left college, you decided which suited you best, then off you went. If you went into identity, it was tough to switch to annual reports. And vice versa. If you did a lot of TV, you just did more and more TV. Or you could take the cash and go into advertising, or give up and go into direct mail.

That was it. It was simple.

The phrase ‘do it yourself’ meant only one thing – striking out on your own. Cutting free. Cutting out that level of ‘annoying creative director’ (and possibly those deeply bugging account directors too) and going it alone. So generations of designers in the UK every few years departed from Pentagram…

…or Wolff Olins…

…(as summed up in this neat diagram*), and did exactly that, and this pattern was echoed around the world. This didn’t escape the thorny issue of pesky clients wanting one thing, and you wanting to do something entirely different. But at least, in one sense, you were doing it for yourself.

And that was the way it was. For decades. Then in the nineties, something changed. A whole swathe of companies merrily ignored the silo system and refused to specialise. At first this was a little discombobulating, but actually, watching a company like Airside merrily switch from logos, to illustration, to animation, to t-shirts or websites was, and is, quite inspiring. It really was possible to swap and chop and change. The silos could be skipped, it seemed.

It now seems that almost anything is possible. Given their new-found freedom, some designers have chosen to concentrate on themselves first, and worry about clients later (with clients assuming the role of ‘occasional corporate sponsors’). Want to do a book? Well, do a book. Fletcher Forbes Gill wrote a small tome on the things that inspired them and found a publisher – fifty years later the company they became, Pentagram, continue to publish but often on their own terms, printing first and signing publishing contracts later.

Stefan Sagmeister’s holidays are almost as important as his real work now – in a way the design industry vacations vicariously through him every five years and many wonder in turn why they can’t take a year out to do whatever they want and hang the consequences. Other designers like Nicolas Feltron and Chris Doyle have turned themselves into the entire story, whether as annual reports or identity guidelines.

The idea of ‘DIY’ isn’t new though. It’s tempting to think that this new-found freedom is a 21st century phenomenon, but for decades designers have had good ideas and pitched them to like-minded people. Harry Beck’s underground map was just an attempt to clean up a messy topographic jumble. The solution that was never commissioned, initially rejected, then only run in a paltry 500 copies. It took two years for the map to receive a decent print run.

Now we’re accustomed to good ideas coming to market much more quickly. Need to print a handful of full-colour books cost-effectively? You’ll need to look at the Bob Books website. Fancy running a few copies of your own little newspaper? Email Newspaper Club.

Looking for ways to combine your two favourite things? Take Niklaus Troxler as your guide. His love of graphic design and jazz led to him setting up his own music festival in his home village of Willisau (population of just over 7,000 people) now in its 36th year. And guess what – he gets to do the poster.

Got something to say? Well, blog about it. Design Observer and DesignBoom are, in effect the new digital design magazines, whilst established actual magazines like Eye magazine are starting to find their digital feet.

Of course, online there’s a lot of this...

...but maybe that’s to be expected.

If you’re fed up with printers, you can try doing it yourself, either screenprinted or risographed at companies like Print Club London and Ditto press.

And maybe graphic design can really translate into product. Thirty years ago it didn’t seem possible – designers like Massimo Vignelli, happily switching from maps and wayfinding to product and furniture design, seemed like a one-off.

But watching M&Co’s legacy continue as products (not graphic design) makes you wonder why graphic designers’ skills can’t translate into ‘things’ more often. Years ago we didn’t consider it, but now we balance identity projects with designing letters, airmail, trousers, tea-cups, fans, you name it. There is no rule that says we must stay in that identity silo, after all.

Do your own type

The advent of cost-effective typography has changed the rules of this game as well. Once a company’s own typeface might cost hundreds of thousands, so something like the VAG typeface (created for Volkswagen Audi Group) would have been a major investment. Now it’s much, much less. Clients look at the ‘tone of voice’ gained by a bespoke font, and they can see the value, and the opportunity to brand with words as well as pictures.

Designers like Henrik Kubel and Jonathan Barnbrook create bespoke designs virtually for every project, partly ‘because they can’, but mainly because it lends each project its own, unique air that becomes much harder to copy.

We’ve been experimenting in down-time with the combination of languages to create bilingual typography. The work stemmed out of a paid project for the Embassy in Japan, but has now become a research project all of its own.

We haven’t really been ‘paid’ for it yet (unless you count the column inches) but that’s not the point – it’s already led to an equivalent project in China. It’s just something that’s interesting, and we’ll do it for ourselves, for now. Of course, when and if a major type foundry wants to talk about making it official, we’ll take the call.

Taking control of the content

The biggest change of the last decade or so is that designers seem less dependent on an insightful client brief, and are stepping into a ‘content vacuum’ with perfectly sound ideas of their own. The Partners neatly combined The National Gallery’s content (world-class images) with a great sponsor (Hewlett Packard) to create this multi-award winning piece.

Johnson banks weren’t briefed to create story-telling barrel sculptures, it just seemed the best way to explain the way the whisky is made.

Trying to control the content doesn’t always work, of course. Tate Britain didn’t react too well to these ideas to ‘bring art to life’ by recreating scenes in the back garden with torches, twins, a baby bath and a submerged `Barbie. Maybe we should re-pitch it now? (Maybe it would just drown again).

Now clients can DIY too

The much-discussed ‘democratisation of design’ already places new stresses on the traditional design process – you might spend years on a new identity only to find final design decisions being made within the design mangler called Word and its ugly sister, Powerpoint.

Projects regularly start with the animated logo in mind - perhaps soon we’ll be starting with the slideshow as the ‘killer app’ with everything following from there (heaven help us all).

Of course crowdsourcing sites, in theory, place complete control right back in the hands of the client, with desperate designers the world over uploading designs for potential prizes as pitiful as $250 and a gleeful client reviewing hundreds of entries.

And we’ve all shuddered at the winners on the Crowdspring site, but someone somewhere designed them, and someone chose them. Or, if you’re searching for a new logo, try Logomyway, where you can choose logos pre-designed, ready to go, from a host of sectors, in myriad styles. Nice.

As it happens, we’re on the lookout for a new logo for johnson banks, so we tried some out. Here are some that we’re particularly pleased with.

But what does it all mean? If, by doing it for ourselves, can we skip around the age-old push-me-pull-you of the designer-client relationship? Perhaps, if you’ve made it perfectly clear that ‘this is what we do’, then enough clients will come knocking and asking for ‘some of that’.

And if you look at the way the design business breaks down, at least 7 out of 10 can be quite happily achieved by doing it yourself, rather than waiting to be asked. But I can’t help feeling that it will be a little longer yet before designers and art directors start designing ads and logos first, then looking for clients later. (But, then again, you never know…)


Thanks to the St Brides Conference for inviting us to talk. We’ll link to other presentations over the two-day period when they come on-line.

*Thanks to Domenic Lippa for his diagram

So it’s degree show time, and you’ll start to find a few tics and traits coming up again and again.

You’ll probably find this degree show cliché site very useful as you tour the country’s hopefuls - it lets you track the worst offending schools and the most recurring ideas.

Here are a few samples.

And a few more.

Very cruel, but very entertaining.

Thanks to Mr T for the tip.

Perhaps it’s been too long a week.

Perhaps the annual reveal of The Chip Shop Awards (which hands out prizes to ads that never ran, or never will) has made me a bit jaded. (I’ve always thought a scheme that congratulates ideas that would never go through was essentially a pointless, albeit funny, exercise).

But I must admit I double-taked at this ad today on the tube. An ad for a sperm bank. Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?

Seems so. And after not much digging it seems the designers (Silk Pearce) also did this.

Well. It’s fair to say that Silk Pearce are successfully mining this graphic seam, so congratulations to them. Although it’s difficult to know what to say at this point without some dodgy pun about ‘helmets’, ‘hats-off’ or ‘swimming against the tide’. So I won’t.

By Michael Johnson

Here are some of the things that took our fancy at this year’s Graphics and Photography BA show at Kingston University. As ever, this is an entirely subjective edit, and bears little or no relation to anyone’s final marks, honest.

One of the most striking partnerships at this year’s show has been that of Anna Brooks and Samantha Harvey who chose to interpret the draconian rules on photographing children by wangling their way into a school. Then they shot entire classes with only the teachers looking into camera.

Kingston students have been known for their group projects for years: here are some that stood out this year: Sarah Corfield, Alex Delaney, Omar Fahmi and Tom Gilbert produced these bikes with strings, not spokes - part of a project to re-invent a musical instrument. (There’s a Vimeo link here.)

Jessica Reynolds and Serena Wise suggested this swatch-like presentation for the next generation of the Ikea catalogue.

A group of four students (Bethan Jones, Leena Patel, Jess Reynolds and James Titterton) have been working for months on a proposal to Shelter for a different type of coin-drop - one that will eventually spell out 'change’.

Away from groups and looking more at individual pieces there were a clutch of great typographic pieces.

Lucy Simmons’ wooden piece is designed to help children practice forming lettershapes when learning to write.

George Acton was inspired by indigenous African cultures to create this woodblock typeface.

And Silje Løkken Rødvik interpreted the Libre Culture manifesto with typographic cress. Obviously.

Lucia Davies turned a project on oxymorons into a commentary on fast food, complete with packaging.

This is Jessica Reynolds’ interpretation of the growing market for human hair in the UK. Must be all those Cheryl Cole-style hair extensions. Or something.

Continuing a long line of self-expression at Kingston shows, James Titterton featured himself across a series of football cards, reflecting his boyhood dream to be a (primarily Sheffield United) footballer, not a graphic designer. (Great hair James).

He also spent time recording his dying Sheffield dialect with type and molten steel, slipping metaphorically between the cracks in pavements.

These are Lucy Peers’ nice little notebooks on ‘practice makes perfect’.

Kirsty Aryee documented our dying greasy spoon café culture, increasingly usurped by high street chains, and showed that it’s an older generation who keep them alive.

Bav Samani seems already to have about 12 businesses up and running already, including some very popular t-shirts.

And, finally, this team (Ed Baigrie, Joe Provis and Billy Steel) answered a Lastminute.com competition brief by placing a bored waxwork dummy around the city to highlight how much free time we really have.

The Kingston show is on in Kingston until 11th June, is showing again at the Village Underground in Shoreditch from the 15-17th June, and highlights will feature at the D&AD New Blood show June 24-28.

The image at the top of this post was by Tom Digby.

Michael Johnson is just finishing his fifth and final year as external examiner on the Graphics course.

Previous years have been recorded here and here.

They say there’s a direct correlation between awards won (or lost) and the relative enjoyment of an awards evening. But, in truth it wasn't a vast surprise that our experimental bi-lingual phonetic typeface that fuses English sounds with Katakana typeforms didn’t bowl over the juries (try saying that with a hangover, tricky).

And all this despite it getting a rave write-up by current president Paul Brazier in this week’s Campaign.

Mind you, Brazier also picked another failed nomination, the fantastic Decode Recode project, so we’re in good company. Given that nominations at D&AD are as rare as hen’s teeth nowadays we’ll settle for that.

The rest of the evening was mainly spent admiring the pencil-gathering of great ideas from Australia, South Africa, France, Germany and the USA, including a black pencil for one of our favourites, the high line in New York.

There were some mutterings, as ever - the Apple website is a nice bit of work, but hard to really argue that it represents a true paradigm shift for its sector (traditionally the benchmark for D&AD's highest possible award). Other mutterings proved unfounded - although nominated before, this was actually the first ever win for Innocent smoothies (nicely written up here).

Technically, although really an integrated ad campaign, the leaflet for the Trillion dollar campaign for The Zimbabwean newspaper won only the 3rd black pencil in a decade in graphic design. And one for the ‘endearingly batty’ vote from the book design jury was their only winner, a hefty cartography tome named ‘Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line’. Absolutely.

Several worried observers realised that, unless you count the designers of the V&A's Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, MUMA (technically architects), there was only one award to British designers, all night, to Hachette Filipacchi Publishing for their Elle magazine covers. Not an impressive statistic.

So either there’s no decent design work being done in the UK at present, or the mainly London-based juries this year (because of the ash cloud) veered towards the unseen and unexpected from abroad. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

You could argue that D&AD’s global expansion, now accepting entries from nearly 70 countries worldwide, has come at the cost of its domestic audience in design. But with only half a dozen or less awards (out of the total of 42) going to UK-based advertising agencies, D&AD continues to chip away at its core supporters there as well.

But grumbling about bias, whether real or just perceived, is probably just a smokescreen. Great work from around the world just raised the bar even higher. We’re all going to have to try a little bit harder, it seems.

As a contrast to last week’s foray into expensive strappy sandals, this week saw the office decamp to Islington for the evening. First to sample the delights of Ottolenghi, foodie paradise, famous for this…

…and this…

…followed by a trip to the Union Chapel to see The Unthanks, darlings of neu-folk and current holders of the ‘most played album of the last 6 months’ prize at johnson banks towers. (You can always predict that category by the give-away of the smashed jewel case).

We can reveal that yes there was clog dancing, yes, Rachel and Becky Unthank are sisters, yes they really can sing, that is their real name and yes it was really good. Honestly. We all wore folky hats, scarves and waistcoats, and may well have joined in the sing-along. Meanwhile it’s back to the pounding drum step remixes.

A few days ago we were out toasting the opening of a shoe shop. This wasn’t your ordinary shoe-shop mind, but shoe-turier to the stars, Rupert Sanderson, in his fourth shop in Bruton place, London.

Regularly seen supporting A-list celebs as they sneak past the paps, Sanderson’s 9-year old business continues to thrive, mainly, we would argue, as a result of the oh-so-wrong yet-so-right logotype we designed for him many moons ago. Oh, and maybe the shoes are impeccably made and designed too.

In case you don’t know the back story, after a decade in design and advertising, Sanderson made the decision to go back to college, but in his case the world-famous shoe-college, Cordwainers. After several years apprenticing in Italy he went it alone, always using the same Italian factory which he eventually took a controlling stake in to preserve the skills of its workforce.

Here are some shaky snaps of must-have heels. These took our fancy.

And these.

We couldn’t help but record what shoe-types wore to a shoe party.

Sanderson himself remains determinedly anti-style, seen here sporting his trusty Clarks desert boots.

Anyway, back to the heels - apparently a certain Ms Cheryl Not-Cole-Anymore has these in many, many colours.

That, we’re told, is ringmark lizard skin. Or was that ring-worm lizard skin? Not sure, the champers had kicked in. But the price? Just one note shy of £900 (Blackberry not included).

Should have charged a bit more for that logo.

The 36 hours spent in Belfast at the end of last week would have been pretty enjoyable anyway (a new talk on a new subject, a workshop with interested and interesting people) but an added extra was a trip out to Downpatrick to visit the Lowden factory.

You may not necessarily be in the market for absolutely world-class, high-end, hand-made acoustic guitars, but just in case, here’s a little record of the visit.

Unlike virtually all their world-class competitors, Lowden still assiduously make theirs by hand, bucking a worldwide trend towards cloning and mechanisation. They’re only interested in making hand-crafted classics, at still just-about-affordable prices.

11 people make about 10 a week, averaging a bit over 400 a year, using the finest wood they can lay their hands on, regularly experimenting with the most weird and wonderful one-offs and all manner of woods you’ve never heard of. Adirondack? Cocobolo? Ziricote? Absolutely.

Here are few shots, pretty much in order, tracking the construction of the guitars from carefully sorted piles of wood all the way to the finished things.

That diagram’s pretty much the holy grail of acoustic guitar construction, the inside ‘bracing pattern’ used to support the soundboard (ie top) of the guitar. The top’s a bit like a loudspeaker, in a way, and needs some very careful handling. Each of those struts below has a carefully designed profile, fine-tuned over 40 years of guitar-making.

A neck before any shaving takes place.

These are for bindings and purflings.

A wonderful greeny-brown wood (think it’s Ziricote) that looks more like a crate than a guitar, before any finishing, sanding or polishing.

Some of the highly specialised Japanese chisels and saws used in the process - at one point thirty years ago Lowdens were made in Japan and some of the most indispensable tools came back to Northern Ireland.

Nearly finished bodies waiting for frets, bridges and tuners (oh, and strings).

Above is a Pierre Bensusan model on the final benches, having its bridge fitted. There’s an 18 week wait for one of those. (There’s a Bensusan video at the end of this post in case you’re going ‘who?’ Shame on you if you are).

Here are some of the final guitars.

Lowden’s are in such worldwide demand they rarely have more than three or four finished guitars in reception before they’re shipped off to hungry guitar shops. No fancy humidified showroom here. So if you’re planning a visit, best to ring beforehand and try to coerce them into holding a few back.

Here’s that blonde you saw earlier. We managed to persuade them not to send it away.

With worldwide sales of guitars (especially acoustics) continuing to boom, you’d say that things should be looking up for George Lowden and his team. Much prized by a whole raft of percussive acoustic players, they’re perhaps a slightly too-well-kept secret. We’re thinking of offering our services. Payment would have to be in instruments, naturally.

Thanks to Andrew at Queen’s University for the invite to talk and to do a workshop, Ricky for the Lowden tour, Sam for the introductions and driving, and Mrs Lowden for the cake. There’s also a piece here on Richard (Acejet 170) Weston’s blog, many of whose nicely framed photos made it into this piece as well.

Below, Mr Pierre Bensusan (playing, of course, a Lowden).

They say with age comes experience. I’m not sure about that, but I do know that with age comes more mailing lists. Over time, at home and at work, through both regular and electronic post, it becomes a deluge.

This used to mean forests of paper from photographers agents – now it means floods of photographer emails. They often apologise for the intrusion but they know, and I know, that they’ve bought access to a mailing list and are merrily emailing every art director in town their latest snaps. So bugging did this become recently that I emailed one back, nicely, and asked where he had got my name (expecting a nervous or vague response). He told me, straight out – Bikinilists.com - who proudly announce the availability of the perfect lists, from just £55 per month. And seem to have nothing to do with beachwear.

I did the only decent thing, emailed through a ‘request to be removed’ (a bit like going ex-directory, I hoped) and they duly promised to do exactly that. Next day, 20 more bl**dy photographer emails. Not ideal. I’m seriously thinking of emailing the directors of Bikinilists a logo every day to show them what it’s like.

The chance to approach individuals, directly, in a highly targeted way, could in theory be an opportunity. Here’s a recent flyer from the Wimbledon dog track who obviously suspect that I could be their kind of punter. Now what kind of list is that? And how did I get on it? How did they know I was, deep down, a dog track kind of guy? Who told them it was my birthday?

But here’s a recent approach, that’s stuck in my mind.

A green fluorescent walking stick arrived (see the top of this post). They don’t want to sell me anything. No drug addled greyhounds, no expensive photoshoots in Mauritius. Nothing. They just want me to change the way I think about the grey market.

They’ve mailed a series of fluorescent items to a selected list of people such as the controller of the BBC and the Chief Exec of Channel 4, with a plea for us to take a 'fresh, brighter look' at the way we portray older people in our work. They’ve set up a website.

Now I wasn’t aware that I was underselling the grey market, or reverting to cliché? But I know that I’m thinking about it, and writing about it, and telling you about it. Maybe I’ll cast older people differently in my next photoshoot, or challenge a client’s assertion that this ‘must work for the youth market’. Maybe the direct approach can work (sometimes).

By Michael Johnson

I recently watched a video clip of the Oasis guitarist, Noel Gallagher, talking about ‘his favourite world cup moments’.

Having admitted that he could barely remember 1974’s tournament, he then proceeded to analyse, in forensic detail, the Argentinian finals 4 years later. Now you might have expected chatter about great goals, flowing hair, the tightness of Mario Kempes’ shorts, military juntas, ticker tape celebrations, sinking the Belgrano, and all that. And they all came up (well, maybe not all of them). But before any of that, his first comment about this world cup? He really loved the logo.

I looked it up. There it is, above. It does have a sort of clear, simple charm. You can see how it would leave an impression on a football mad 11 year old Mancunian (although the colour match to the strip of his beloved Manchester City is a bit of a give away). But seeing the compelling, clunky logic of a design from 30 years ago compels you to Google-image a few more.

So what do we get? Well, we’re about to see a lot more of this one – straight out of brushstroke central, to be parked straight back there once its lease has expired. But at least you could say it’s marginally better than this shocker from the last tournament.

If you look back, it’s amazing how few you remember. Mexico has had two goes at it and neither fare so well. For the older of the pair, they obviously had some Letraset left over from Lance Wyman’s Olympics scheme of two years earlier.

The 1966 date might be ingrained on English memories (the one and only victory) but few will remember this badge.

Parked over in a pile marked ‘completely generic and instantly forgettable’ are ones like these - Germany ’74 and France ’98. That’s WM for ‘weltmeisterschaft’, in case you were wondering.

I always quite liked Woody Pirtle’s mark for USA ‘94 (clever mix of balls, stars and stripes)…

…but always suspected someone else put this type on when Woody went out to lunch, or when he wasn’t looking.

Perhaps grudging respect should go to Spain’s offering from 1982. Movement? Flag? Ball? It could have been worse.

Oddly, and again perhaps because of relative English success/tragedy (semi-finals, Gazza, tears, penalities, more tears, etc) the Italia ’90 mark and its mascot feel as though someone cared, a least a little.

I can only presume that the 2002 design for Korea and Japan is meant to be some sort of vague reference to the re-designed Jules Rimet trophy, since this motif crops up again in the last German and now South African marks as well…

…hence exacerbating the recent whole less-is-a-bore, I’ll-go-for-more aesthetic that pervades the designs for most modern sports tournaments and Olympiads.

But now for the good news. The weird wiggly person plus ball thing? It’s been dropped for the next tournament. 1-0. And the tournament is in Brazil. 2-0. You know, five-time winners and everyone’s second favourite team. Game over.

The bad news? The logo looks like this.

Sigh.

How is it that ‘the beautiful game’ never gets a beautiful logo?

By Michael Johnson

There are couple of  talks coming up in May from johnson banks’ Creative Director Michael Johnson.

First of all, next week Johnson is in Belfast, talking at Queens University Belfast on the subject, ‘where the ideas come from’ .

The talk is on Thursday the 20th May at 6.00pm. There’s a pdf invite here and general information here. Admission seems to be free, but the tickets are limited.

After that, he’s giving the Keynote address on the 27th of May at this year’s St Bride’s conference, which this year explores the theme of DIY design. Here’s a copy of the splurge for this talk.

The world used to be full of barriers. Twenty years ago a designer trying something new faced insurmountable hurdles. But now, the gate is open. Want to design a font? Go ahead. Can’t wait for a publisher? Print it yourself. Got an idea for a product? Test it tomorrow. A generation of designers has become restless waiting for something to happen and is placing their destinies in their own hands. Is it working? Can DIY replace the traditional push-me-pull-you of the client relationship? Are we at the beginning of a new age of craft-based, cottage industries, or is it a false dawn?

Go here for more general information about this one, and go here for the full line up over the two days, which includes design legend Wolfgang Weingart, amongst others. It’s only £50 for students, for a two-day conference, which strikes us as a bit of a bargain.

One of the projects we were directly involved with over the election period was helping Save the Children with a campaign that linked their UK work with their overseas programmes.

We did this by concentrating on the worries of parents, and by showing that mothers in Sheffield and Sierra Leone, London and Liberia (etc) faced similar problems. The only change in the multiple copylines created for the campaign, comes at the end of each sentence.

Here are some applications from this ‘I worry’ campaign that ran in targeted constituencies, and rather than overtly support any one party, encouraged the electorate to examine each of the parties’ records and plans for child rights going forward.

Tomorrow’s UK election has already been one of the most intriguing for years, primarily due to the rapidly increasing poll figures of the ‘third’ party, the Liberal Democrats. But could it be that its leader, Nick Clegg and his followers, have missed a crucial trick in their campaign?
 
I started making notes for this piece a few weeks ago, bookmarking poster sites, leafing through party manifestos, looking for a sign that design and communications have had some sort of critical sway in the public’s decision making. After all, most observers seem to agree that the Obama campaign was held together and propelled by a clear and carefully managed design and communications approach.

But aside from a few online funnies, nothing much had stood out. Only a few weeks ago a broadsheet journalist rang me and we had fun at the third party’s expense on the reveal of their election party slogan ‘change that works for you. Building a fairer Britain’ which seemed to have been hastily cobbled together in the pub from the Labour (a future fair for all) and Conservative (year for change) statements. Their campaign logo itself seemed crashed together in a hasty mess then stuck in a feather plucked off their main party symbol.

After that, there hasn’t been much else to dissect, from a design point of view.
 
But the seemingly genuine rise of a third choice has got me thinking about colour. British politics has been formally colour coded for decades, Labour is red, the Conservatives blue and the Liberals a sort of yellowy-orange. But few of them have either tried to break out of their colour shackles, or make the most of their chosen shade.

David Cameron’s ‘eco’ revolution was ushered in by his local-government-esque scribbly green tree logo, but since the heat has gone out of the climate debate (and he’s been forced to talk about ‘real’ stuff) his party has lurched back to their home territory of blue, with, as designers would say, green as ‘a highlight’. In fact I think I caught him saying ‘blue with a hint of green’ in one of the recent TV debates and I felt as though I was in Homebase picking paint colours for a bathroom.
 
Labour of course is red: even during the Blair landslide of 1997, New Labour, Clause 4 and all that, the issue of ‘Labour = red rose = red’ was never questioned. But you never felt that red was wholeheartedly embraced by New Labour, being the signifier for old socialism rather than their new fresher, brighter tinge. Blair’s famously presidential walk to the door of No10 for the first time was marked by hundreds of waving union jacks, not red flags.

Meanwhile American politics usually becomes a game in which their designers vie to see who can remix the stars and stripes into a new recipe: the last campaign was no different. Most acknowledge that the Obama camp was quick to claim ‘blue gradients’ as a signature style and John McCain’s campaign never really recovered. Over here, the colour coding is so ingrained that the thought of a centre or centre-left party embracing blue as their colour would be viewed as a horrific lurch to the right.

Internationally, politicians seem much more adept at claiming colours for their cause. Only last year in Iran, presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi used green as his rallying cry against the ruling powers and the ‘green revolution’ was up and running, with cyberspace crammed with vibrant veridian images. Viktor Yushchenko’s pitch for power in the Ukraine in 2004 was symbolized by orange scarves and swiftly became ‘the Orange revolution’.

Thailand’s political upheaval’s are simply condensed down to the red-shirts and the yellow-shirts.

Away from politics, but still about revolution, Manchester United supporters loyal to their club but unified in their hatred of the club’s owners, the Glazers, openly wear the green and gold colours of their original club, Newton Heath.

The beauty of colour as a symbol of change is that it’s unnervingly simple. No banners are needed, no placards and absolutely no messy lick and stick with Cow gum on the kitchen table. Find a piece of clothing in chosen colour, go out, march, dodge real or verbal bullets (where appropriate). It’s become so popular to rally around a colour that it even has a wikipedia name – the colour revolutions.
 
So, should Nick Clegg, the new darling of British politics, (or ‘Cleggerella’, as dubbed by the Guardian) have taken a tip from the colour revolutions? Should he have declared a yellow revolution? In theory, yes, but first of all, they have to decide what colour they really are? Is that yellow? Or butter milk? Or gold? Or just good old orange? We can’t call it the ‘sort-of-yellowy-orange-kind-of revolution’, can we?

Now orange, there’s a colour you can rally behind. It’s vibrant, strong and distinctive. It’s a colour you can believe in, a colour of change, a colour you can take into battle, and win. If Clegg fails tomorrow it was because of his shade of yellow, not his policies (in my humble opinion).

By Michael Johnson

Having designed what was meant to be a simple flip-flop poster with two overlapping rectangles of colour...

...yesterday’s ‘quick printing visit’ to Somerset House became a 6 hour marathon.

Your memories of teenage screen printing at school are edited down to the best bits - seeing the colours for the first time, getting the first decent print, sticking the finished product on the wall, all of that.

You forget the bit where the screen keeps drying up and registration takes forever and the transparent inks look, well, just a little more opaque than you planned.

And you forget that you should have spent a bit more time in the gym working on your upper arms to pull ink across a large poster for any amount of time.

But then you look at the results and remember there’s something great about ink with actual edges, colour mixed and pulled by a person, not a machine. That mistakes can look great, accidents can and will happen and that’s part of the beauty of it all.

Thanks to Kate, Garret, Serene and Yanni for yesterday afternoon’s crash course at Print Club London’s temporary headquarters at the Pick Me Up show. The poster shown above and all the other prints from the show will be available now or soon on the Print Club London website, along with a raft of treasures (properly) printed by their proper members.

Just a quick reminder that Somerset House’s Pick me up show is only on until the end of Monday, so if you haven’t been you’re running out of time. We were there today and it’s definitely worth a look.

The fair runs from 23 April - 3 May 2010 in the Embankment Galleries, South Wing of Somerset House, open daily 10.00-19.00.

Michael Johnson will be printing posters in the exhibition on the afternoon of Sunday the 2nd of May

There’s been a flurry of emails and queries across the world’s creative studios over the last few days as D&AD (probably still the world’s pre-eminent design and advertising competition) posted its results on-line, day by day, as judging finished.

So rather than wait the obligatory week or three for results (although it takes a bit of sifting through) we now know the headline results.

On first look, it’s good news for the world’s bookshelves – the annual will be thinner. Even though the total entries to the competition stayed about the same, ‘in-book’ selections are down to 560 items from last years 717. Total nominations are down too, with 135 nominated for that famous yellow pencil, down from last year’s 165.

Skim through the results, and at first it seems like business as usual. There are multiple nominations for Apple, one for Innocent smoothies. There are clutches of nominations for DDB’s Volkswswagen work. Blink and it could have been any year from the last ten (or testament to long-running high standards, depending on how you look at it).

As predicted, M&C Saatchi’s excellent Dixons campaign is in with several shouts.

The more niche juries, such as Magazines and Editorial continue to punch above their weight and remain relentlessly positive, with seven nominations, and book design picked five.

Environmental design even managed to nominate some of our own personal favourites, such as the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, and the High Line in New York.

The V&A’s innovative remix of its Recode: Decode exhibition (shown at the top of this post) has also been nominated.

Skimming through the stats shows that, if you didn’t know it before, this show has become genuinely global, with clutches of nominations going to the USA, Germany, China and Japan. If you’re wondering why it’s become so hard to win, it’s because the bar keeps going up, every year.

As ever, some of the juries throw up some odd results. The Graphic design team, in a sterling effort weakened by ‘ash-cloud’ no-shows, selected 68 items to go in-book, but could then only find 4 of them worthy of a nomination. (They were probably just exhausted by looking at 2,000-odd entries).

Contrast that to the TV and Cinema crafts jury, who, having whittled it down to 55 items, merrily proceeded to nominate 30 of them. Yes, you read that correctly.

It’s these skewed results from jury to jury that infuriates D&AD’s entrants, and rightly so. It creates a sense of injustice and warps the evening towards TV advertising (there will be 40 nominations in total for this sector). This comes even after a year universally accepted as horribilis for the ad sector. Just imagine what would have happened after a good year.

With a global scheme like this, there’s no doubt that the ‘shock of the new’ plays a significant role. Unseen-before, interesting work from around the world always seems, well, more interesting and this draws attention away from projects already praised elsewhere. Mark Farrow’s limited edition Pet Shop Boys box set? In book, but no further.

Really Interesting Group’s first newspaper? The same.

Probably the most discussed brand relaunch of last year was Wolff Olins’ Aol scheme but it didn’t even make the book. We thought our Pew Center scheme had some merit. The jury didn’t.

All that these examples show is that the unusual and edgy, or those that court controversy often play out badly at D&AD. And it’s especially difficult to judge something really good, but a little familiar, whilst something bright, shiny and new sits on an adjacent board. It takes judges with balls to say to themselves, and their juries, ‘ok it may not be yours or my cup of tea, but I think it should be in’.

But this is how competitions work. They are subjective. They get skewed. By virtue of its position, still, as the one to win, D&AD’s results are pored over and analysed, perhaps over-analysed. We’d all love there to be an objective record of the best work of every year, but just the sheer foibles of human nature seem incapable of supplying it. The best thing to do is just accept it, shrug those shoulders and move on.

Just for clarification, when something get ‘in-book’ that means it has been accepted into the annual. Some prizes would call this a bronze. If a project is nominated, this is the equivalent of a silver in other schemes. But only nominated projects that gain the majority of votes from their jury win a yellow pencil (slightly confusingly called a silver, but the equivalent of other schemes’ gold). There is a separate judging procedure where all of the nominated pieces are re-judged, and a majority vote would gain that piece the very rare ‘black pencil’ (also known as gold in D&AD circles). Confused?

In the interests of full disclosure, johnson banks entered 10 projects into the competition, 9 of which were rejected. One piece got in and is nominated, our Phonetikana typeface.

You may have already read about Pick me up, the contemporary graphic art fair that opens at Somerset House tonight.

Billed as a graphic arts fair, Pick me up is the first of its kind in this country, tapping into the current interest in limited edition, affordable graphic art, illustration and design. The vast majority of the work will be on sale, and Somerset House have invited various design collectives and galleries, including Concrete Hermit, Le Gun, It’s Nice That, NoBrow and Peepshow (below) to set up shop in the galleries, selling specially commissioned work from spaces that they will have designed and installed themselves.

Exclusive prints will be on sale from the likes of Alex Trochut (image at the top of this post), James Joyce and Mr Bingo.

Paper artist Rob Ryan (above) will move his studio to the space for the duration of the show, and Print Club London are doing the same thing, moving their printing gear in for 10 days to print specially designed 50-off special commissions from a range of designers, including Jonathan Barnbrook, Angus Hyland and Marion Deuchars, Morag Myerscough, Anthony Burrill (shown below) and johnson banks’ Michael Johnson.

The twist is that all of the above have been asked to go in and actually print their posters, for real, which may entail getting actual ink on actual fingers. Blimey.

The whole thing sounds bonkers, but great - we’re all for supporting any exhibiting of graphic design (a rare event in this country) so we’re very pleased to be involved.

Here are some preview pictures, kindly sent through by head curator, Claire Catterall.

The private view is tonight, and the the fair runs from 23 April - 3 May 2010 in the Embankment Galleries, South Wing of Somerset House, open daily 10.00-19.00, until 20.00 on Friday 23 April and Thursday 29 April.

Michael Johnson will be printing posters in the exhibition on the afternoon of Sunday the 2nd of May

Here are some random images from today’s D&AD judging.

Some nice bits of type.

Sneaking a look at some other categories.

Weirdest logo of the day: ‘moms against climate change’?

Some killer bits of stationery.

Photographing the photographer.

Observe: the jury foreman judging with one hand and drinking white wine with the other. Such multi-tasking.

Sneaking a look at the President’s notes.

And the most multi-entered item of the year? Must be this paper Trojan horse. We counted five entries of the same item.

For the record, Michael Johnson was jury foreman of the typography jury - from two hundred-odd entries, about twenty went in the book and there was a handful of nominations. More details follow on the D&AD site later this week.

In the midst of ash-cloud mania in Europe (which for non-European readers’ information has shut down all air flights) you’d think that the main issue would be getting all the Tarquins and Esmerelda’s back in time for school from their Easter breaks in Dubai.

But actually London’s creative community is reeling from the news that very few international judges will be able to attend this week’s D&AD judging.

The main benefit of the international judges, apart from adding a little bit of glamour to the proceedings, is their ability to say things like ‘well I think it’s great’ without any prior knowledge of who did what and when.

Left to their own devices, UK jurors usually just vote each others’ work out, then everything collapses into internecine warfare of almost biblical proportions. And about three things get in.

We may of course be wrong, and a new spirit of devil-may-care what-the-hell-I-like-it post-recession euphoria may kick in. Maybe.

We’re judging tomorrow - we’ll keep you posted.

Grafik magazine have recently started a new online feature where they interview the people running design blogs they like.

This week it's the turn of Thought for the Week. Go here to read the online interview with johnson banks’ Michael Johnson.

The series is called ‘Site Specific’ and has already covered one of ours (and everyone’s) favourite blogs, Ace Jet 170, and Amelia’s Magazine. 

We’ve just finished the first stages of the new identity for Ravensbourne. Having launched it internally a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been given the go-ahead to share the work with a wider audience.

We were appointed well over a year ago to help the organisation as it moves later this year from its current Chislehurst home to a landmark new building (shown below, by Foreign Office Architects) next to the 02/Dome in Greenwich.

We were asked to help create a new verbal and visual identity that would reflect the huge change in emphasis that the new building will bring, one focussed on a digital future and innovation.

The building’s design is dominated by tens of thousands of anodised aluminium tiles that tessellate across its skin, following a tiling pattern established by Roger Penrose.

We decided that this visual signature should be included in the visual identity - the beauty of the tessellating pattern is that it seems to vary continuously, but only emanates from three basic tile shapes. It seemed an apt educational analogy that from just a few basic shapes, anything was possible.

From the three tiles, we then incorporated the Ravensbourne name, thrown through the tiles at different angles.

We’ve also made it integral to the scheme that there are multiple combinations of the logo itself.

In total there are six different combinations.

We’ve chosen the versions where the tiles seem in motion (either about to resolve, or about to spin again) so the tiles themselves appear to be ‘stills’ of an animation.

Here’s a trial animation of the logo in motion.

A key part of the scheme is a set of photographs of Ravensbourne students, which have then been retouched to incorporate the pattern.

Here’s Oluyinka Lapido...

...Kozue Sufu...

...and Osvaldo Moniz.

Jodie Mclean and Kirsty Nolan.

And Ronnie Howard.

There are around 20 shots of the students in total.

Below are some of the first applications of the scheme including stationery, a biased-edge prospectus and the proposed approach to the web.

Within the scheme there’s the freedom to experiment more with the pattern...

...and we’ve already begun trials of 3d ‘wraps’ of the building across shapes and objects for use in future applications.

Next stages on this project are a vast array of extra applications, and a cohesive approach to wayfinding within the building itself. We’ll post more on this closer to the opening date in the autumn.

Our thanks to an army of collaborators on this project: Ravensbourne student placements Chelsea Palmer and James Taylor (who also worked on the test animations), The Foundry for their sharp eyes on typography, Ross Cooper for his 3d visualisation, Jan Masny for the photography and Mike Reed for some wordsmithing. And of course to our student models.

Ravensbourne is a university sector college innovating in design and digital media.

Visiting Cardiff recently offered the chance to see how our recent scheme for St David’s (the vast new shopping and apartment region in the centre of the city), was bedding in.

Having been working from CGI’s and mock-ups for a couple of years, it’s always good to see real signage, and real buildings.

Real (and rather dotty) versions of the logo.

Real security guards (with real blazers).

And slightly unreal sights like this, the lovely Myleene with a St David’s gradient behind her.

The timing of the opening last year coincided with a serious retail dip, so not all the units are let, yet. But this does mean that our graphic devices and elements turn up in the oddest of places, at vast sizes and scales. It’s a bit like walking through a 3d version of the design manual, at the moment.

Slightly unexpected. But with a huge (and already hugely successful) John Lewis at one end, everything augers well for this scheme once things take an upwards turn.

There’s a long piece on johnson banks and our identity projects in the current issue of Computer Arts Projects. It’s a pretty extensive article featuring a full cross section of projects from the last few years.

Also featured in this issue (which is dedicated to logo design and identity) is design legend Michael Wolff, The Partners’ work on the BBC iplayer logo, and identity projects from Saffron and various other contributors.

I’ve been trying to write about failure recently, but I’ve struggled.

Ours is a business where failure isn’t allowed. When it happens, it’s swept under the carpet. Lost that pitch? Never mind, the client’s a fool. Presentation didn’t go well? Have a drink, move on. Tomorrow’s another day.

The projects that never make it past the client, or creep into the real world but never feature at award shows get quickly forgotten – the graphic canon isn’t crammed full of failure, as a whole. This is harsh, and Darwinian, but understandable. We don’t like to talk about the trickier ones, or the ones that got away.

I’ve found myself analyzing the process of failure recently. Nothing especially bad has happened, most of our projects are fine. But the recession halted at least three in mid-stream, a couple have gone pear-shaped. A long term client has come back and asked us to ‘amend’ their logo slightly more quickly than we would have liked.

The identity shown in this post was approved last year by its client, Unit Architects. But we’re not entirely sure how far they will take it past the items we’ve shown here – there’s just a sense that they don’t ‘get’ what we want to do, and may simply move on to something less challenging, soon. Not a failure, as such, just a disappointment.

Melbourne’s new identity seems to be turning fast from an interesting scheme into something much more dull. But, it happens.

Of course there is some precedent for swifter change – companies are tweaking their identities on a faster and faster cycle that might once have been 20 years, then 10, but now might be 5. As identity and branding increasingly becomes the glue that both holds organizations together AND lead its communications, increased turnover is perhaps inevitable.

Usually, the tweaking is done by another agency and some brands have been through so many re-designs and tweaks that it’s hard to say exactly who did what anymore. Paul Rand famously wrote to UPS asking if he could amend the ribbon on his logo having had a change of heart about the drawing…

…but UPS eventually just changed it altogether (to an altogether shinier version). He did however get two cracks at the IBM logo, introducing the now famous multi-line version several years after the original.

Just a glimpse at Rand’s portfolio shows how failure can slightly taint your views – there’s nothing wrong with his Enron mark…

…or the NeXT logo.

It’s just that one company turned out to be crooks, the other simply ahead of its time, and quickly disappeared.

Perhaps failure is something that we’re not supposed to discuss. Our ‘mailer’ for a Daniel Libeskind building attracted major donors, but didn’t win over South Kensington council, who blocked its planning permission.

Did it fail? Well, technically, yes. Although it won awards, so it was a famous failure, if that’s possible. We’ve had major corporates get almost to print, then boardroom shuffles and conflicts have whipped the carpet away, leading to full scale redesigns. Several times the ‘incoming’ bosses have found the design routes too challenging, (but of course there’s a healthy dose of ‘not invented here syndrome’ as well).

Thinking about Tim Burton, and the timeline outside his recent exhibition, reminded me that some people like Burton keep creating and producing and there’s no clear sign as to what will succeed and what will fail. But if you get enough projects out of the door, your hit rate has to be statistically higher. It has to be.

In design, as we inch out of recession, there’s a tendency for both client and designer to play safe. But that doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Organisations need to stand out, be noticed, be differentiated, and ‘more of the same’ doesn’t do any of those things.

The risk of failure may be there, it’s true. But the risks of being ignored? Far, far worse.

By Michael Johnson

So the conversation goes something like this....

‘We think it would be great to celebrate Spring by doing our own version of Holi, you know, that Hindu festival where everyone chucks colour at each other....’   Er, maybe.

Cue much chucking of (glittery) colour.

This is how it’s really done. Now that’s really messy.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Photo: REUTERS/Utpal Baruah

Photo: REUTERS/Babu

Having seen at least 4, and now spoken in 3, what’s fascinating about the Pecha Kucha phenomenon is that no two events are ever the same. Bilingual barracking in a concrete bunker in Tokyo seemed a million miles away from a cinema in the Chapter arts centre in Cardiff, and it is, but the format still brings it all together.

The genius of the 20 x 20 structure allows for stumbling speakers to just about get through their allotted time. Seasoned orators play chicken with the 20 second rule, and the good ones (if they’ve practiced) do pretty well. And there are those who you simply wouldn't, or couldn't, listen to for 45 minutes - but six and a bit minutes is just about perfect.

We had all of the above last week in Cardiff: here are my memories and some hastily snapped pics from the evening.

Kelly Page had the tricky job of kicking it all off but shared some interesting thoughts on where digital media is going (and what IP discussions we’ll have next with our kids). The Partner’s Nick Clark shared his slides on creative techniques, including this great one on the brief for the Sistine Chapel.

As befits an idea started by architects for architects, we had a couple of our own: Bernadette Kinsella talked us through a recent sustainable project and the Chapter’s own architect, Robert Sakula, showed some great images of bizarre spaces and places.

Martin McCabe aired his 3d showreel, then Francis Daly, a third year student at Cardiff School of Art & Design, dealt pretty well with his nerves and talked about his recent trip to Malaysia. Vaughan Sivell shared a completely different journey talking about the challenges of making a producing a film shot around the fabulous Barafundel bay in Pembrokeshire.

Stand-outs of the evening? Well, on paper ‘9 things about The Danes’ felt like time to nip to the loo but in practice Gerry Whelan was a Pecha Kucha natural and mixed neat slides on ‘Danish stuff he liked’ with ‘weird stuff he’d seen them do’ (like carry a sofa on a bicycle). Obviously.

Manchester Met’s David Crow was another natural whose short treatise on virtual handicraft was virtually perfect (and contained many examples of the PK imperative - really great, intriguing slides).

I’d hoped Chantal Coady’s ‘Chocolate journey’ was going to be tasty, and it was - let’s face it you don’t hear talks from chocolate entrepreneurs that often, especially those prepared to show snaps from their family album (that’s her in the early eighties - those were the days)...

...and she’s the small child being peered at in the back of this beetle.

Here’s one of her creations, possibly the world’s first chocolate wedding dress. Great stuff.

Unexpectedly, the scientist Neil Young’s tirade against false science in advertising was fantastic - apologies - I was so gripped my photographic record of his talk doesn’t quite do it justice.

And to round it all off, spoken word artist (OK, poet to you and me) Mab Jones, shared her very precisely written admission that, after a recent trip to America, prepared to say that Ameri-can’t, had to admit that Ameri-could.

Again, the pics don’t do it justice, I was too busy laughing.

Thanks to the event’s organisers and sponsors, especially Louisa Cameron.

By Michael Johnson.

There’s more information about the speakers and links to their various websites and blogs here.

Before I sat down to write this I hoovered the carpet. This morning I googled a couple of recipes. Yesterday I photoshopped some family photos.

What’s wrong with that paragraph? Well, nothing, really, apart from the 3 product names that are so ubiquitous they’ve become verbs.

For twenty years, Photoshop® has been used to manipulate, retouch, stretch, distort and beautify. It’s the only computer program regularly mentioned in the media.

We’re drawn into newspaper discussions of manipulated imagery, or if David Cameron’s face should have been airbrushed quite so much on that infamous poster. Defence ministry’s can, er, ‘enhance’ their evidence of missiles. Judges of photographic competitions make on-the-spot decisions about whether an image is ‘real’ or not. It’s everywhere. Adobe’s lawyers must be seriously worried that its carefully protected ® is in serious danger of being hoovered away.

Oddly though, it's hard to feel that much affection for it. Such is its ubiquity, we take it for granted. For a program celebrating its 20th birthday, it’s hard to find anyone with anything positive to say about it, and hard to find evidence that anyone is using it in a way that will make the hairs stand up in the back of your neck.

Once, photo retouching was an expensive and time consuming business. High-end Quantel machines demanded hundreds of pounds an hour for their services. Retouching bills well into the thousands were de rigeur - purely from an accounting perspective, it’s had a massive effect on creative businesses and in many ways we couldn’t function without it. It has been at the forefront of countless design trends: the introduction of effects like the ‘blur’ filter brought a tsunami of designs with it. Of course, each of these approaches became instantaneously dated, visibly ‘franked’ by the chosen trick from the magicians hat, but that didn’t stop many from riding each wave as it passed.

Perhaps because it’s never had a head-to-head rival, its monopoly has created few acolytes. Whilst the Pagemaker/Quark/Indesign debate fostered loyalties on all sides (and even now the Illustrator/Freehand debate continues, 134 comments later) Photoshop has been everpresent, the everyday airbrush we take for granted.

Paradoxically, our memories of older projects seem slightly rose-tinted. Much more had to be done ‘in-camera’ – this led to happy accidents, angles and ideas that probably would never have come by just looking at a screen. Why Not Associates’ Andy Altmann remembers this fondly: ‘in our early work we were embracing the spontaneous moments we achieved when we placed an object in front of some lights, coloured gels and 35mm projections. We never quite knew what to expect. It was always a surprise and a wonder’.

The incredible panoramas and images created by 60s and 70s sleeve designers and art directors (think Pink Floyd sleeves and B&H ads) involved painstaking tinting, dyeing, stripping in and retouching. There’s a magic to these projects that’s hard to explain. Perhaps knowing they had been so laboriously created, their very impossibility made them more interesting.

George Lois’s famously retouched Esquire covers from the sixties routinely sold magazines all on their own, no coverlines required.

Pink Floyd tried as hard as they could to shoot their Battersea ‘pig’ in camera, only resorting to retouching it when the best pink animal and the perfect sky were clearly on different transparencies. For their designers, Hipgnosis, the cover for Wish You Were Here involved a burning man shaking hands. An idea photographed then, almost certainly retouched now.

This photographic process became close to creating a small work of art. Altmann admits that he will ‘still take great delight in showing students an old piece of work and saying ‘there is no photoshop used in creating this’, and looking at their faces questioning 'how the hell did they do that?’

In its early days of development, certain digital photographic effects still had the power to shock. April Greiman’s decision to stretch her naked pixellated body all the way across a design was unprecedented and nearly blew up her computer in the process.

Neville Brody’s experiments with alpha layers and typography? Saville and Wakefield’s waste paintings? Sagmeister’s Chaumont poster? All indebted to our pixellated friend.

But these examples can feel quickly of their time. Sit a non-designer in front of it now and you’ll discover just how complex it’s become, with a baffling array of tools - the program either stands in the way of those happy accidents, or we’ve given up and looked elsewhere. Jonathan Barnbrook echoes this: ‘I want other pathways which create images that not everybody else is using. If it’s low tech, and difficult to do something, then that is part of the process. You should use the parameters of the tools with delight, rather than see it them as a hindrance. Beware of programmes that claim they can do everything’.

Malcolm Garrett feels that it’s part of the whole move towards a world of photography without film, processing or prints. ‘The digital camera has actually outshone Photoshop, because that's the bit we hold in our hands, and the bit that makes the pictures. That's the 'toy' we play with’.

Apart from the occasional digital trickery of designers such as Non Format, another, newer wave of designers seem more interested in hand made, hand-drawn or geometric images – Photoshop is surely involved, somewhere, but its influence is behind the scenes, not front of stage.

Barnbrook himself is critical of Adobe’s pre-eminence - ‘The CS suite is too expensive and has now become an interface nightmare. The ‘endless possibilities' feeling has gone - lost under slow inconsistent palettes and pc like commands’. Meanwhile Garrett grudgingly appreciates it: ‘ironically, the fact that Photoshop is embedded in almost every aspect of the digital communications process, in a ubiquitous and somewhat seamless way, means that we really take it for granted. Because we'd be stuck without it, we hardly notice it's there. It's a bit like breathing, you can't stop and look at it, without choking. Expressing any kind of interest in such a brilliantly powerful piece of software is akin to fetishising over a Sable hair paintbrush, or the joy of mixing your own paint from raw pigment. It's a bit existential. And a bit weird’.

Younger designers such as Armin Vit are less critical: ‘it has created a new medium that any creative can exploit. Whether it's someone correcting breast sizes for a mainstream advertising campaign, or retouching the blotchy cheeks of a CEO for an annual report, or creating trippy illustrations with Photoshop effects, this little piece of software has empowered us to make our work better. That is, if you stay clear of the emboss filter’.

Paradoxically, the democratisation of a once difficult process has made it everyday, and expected. Perhaps soon a generation of designers who never knew what came ‘before’ will really show us an ‘after’. Perhaps. But Photoshop will need to surprise us again first.

This is an adaptation of a piece for this month’s Creative Review by Michael Johnson

We’ll be in Cardiff later this week to take part in Wales’s first Pecha Kucha.

In case you don’t know, Pecha Kucha is the rapid fire slideshow event invented by our friends Klein Dytham in Tokyo that has spread like wildfire around the world. Originally developed by Dytham as a technique to stop his overly-wordy architecture students blathering on for much more than five minutes, it’s proving fantastically popular as an event in itself.

Whilst TED talks are famously under 20 minutes but allow for multiple thoughts, strands and threads, a PK talk doesn’t really allow for more than one thought, discussed for precisely 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And it's a serious test for even the most practiced of speakers.

Johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson, is one of the victims, and the full list is below. We’re especially keen to hear Chantal Coady, she of Rococo chocolate (on the Kings Road) fame, discussing her ‘Chocolate journey’.

The event is this Thursday 25th March at Chapter, Market Road, Canton, Cinema 1. The doors open at 6pm, with the event itself 6.30-8pm.

PK Cardiff has been launched, and will be hosted by Louisa Cameron. There’s more information here and a post about the last Pecha Kucha we did, in Tokyo, here.

The following is a recent electronic conversation between design journalist Yolanda Zappaterra and Michael Johnson on the state and future of poster design.

YZ: Will there still be print posters in the future, and if so who and what will they be for and what do you envisage them being like?

MJ: I hope that there will still be a place for printed posters, they remain a powerful way for people to reach out to certain audiences. The trouble is, whilst a decade ago, we were designing poster sets for all manner of clients because that was a powerful way to communicate in classrooms, corridors or train stations (in our case), there seems to be much less interest now. Why spend 20 grand or more on a poster set (with its incumbent postage issues) when you can put the information on a website for half that? That, I’m afraid, are the harsh economics of the situation. We’ve had to look elsewhere for regular sources of work.

Unfortunately we’re now surrounded by a dreadful standard of poster design, pretty much wherever you look. On the underground, endless ‘floating head’ cinema cross-track posters stare back at us and cultural institutions seem just happy to blow up a picture of the featured artists’ work then whack a logo in the corner.

Whilst the art of the poster still lives on in Holland and France, it seems that the poster in the UK barely stumbles along in student portfolios, gripped by hidden hands, usually showing a limited edition print of something inane like a cat drawing or a piece of geometric type. There’s very rarely a message, or a piece of genuine communication, if I’m honest.

But, on the positive side, there’s still a basic desire to print something out, wall-sized, stand back and just glory in the sheer scale of a poster. I don’t think that effect of scale will ever go away, that’s why I hope people will always love them. But I fear I’m in a minority.

I like to think that as long as there are walls, there will be people producing posters to stick on them, and that there will always be a need for such a 'throwaway' yet eye-catching marketing and propaganda tool. Do you agree, or do you think that eventually even the tiniest theatres will replace posters with screen-based advertising?

The digital screens themselves won’t completely replace the original printed piece, I’m sure. But as the printed form becomes increasingly rare, the time and budget to allocate decent budgets to decent posters (and decent poster designers) will inevitably diminish. Already we’ve seen the downgrading of ‘design’ as advertising agencies have ring-fenced outdoor advertising for their needs. Often they’ll use blow up the print advert and go home early.

If posters are eventually replaced by Blade Runner-style multimedia and interactive screens (as is already happening in tube stations), what skills should graphic designers be learning to ensure they're equipped for and even be in a position to drive the changes?

We’re already at a transition point, where companies have sprung up whose ‘job’ it is to animate traditional ‘still’ posters into moving, dynamic images with varying degrees of success. What will start to happen soon is that designers and agency creatives will start to realise that having a ‘moving’ idea is just as important as the static idea. (I guess you could argue that all we’re talking about is a moving poster, not a static one). Trouble is, you often end up with movement for movement’s sake, a bit like the early days of web animations. Until creatives come to understand this new challenge, punters will just do the mental equivalent of ‘skip intro’ in the way we did with all those dreadful website splash pages.

But once the idea of a moving poster becomes the norm, then I hope we’ll see a new wave of compelling digital communication for these new channels.

Do you think the skills associated with print posters (understanding of DPI, working with large scale etc) are being lost by emerging designers, and if so what does that mean for the expression and dissemination of counter cultural and protest graphics?

I would imagine that some of those traditional skills will start to be lost, yes. If you don’t practice, you never learn, let’s face it. As a rule though, posters were always most successful in their simplest form – two or three colours, simple design. That’s not a huge technical requirement, to be honest.

There's evidence that in art and international design, interesting new directions are being forged that draw on and reference the art of poster design. Such innovation seems less apparent in the UK. Is that true do you think, and if so, why?

I think the ad agencies here are going through a confused patch – they’ve become so obsessed with social media that large scale ideas or technological wizardry are more likely to be seen abroad. But to be fair, clients are currently running a little scared. Because marketing departments still tend to turn to their agencies for their comms, and attention now flips between on-line and on-tv, ‘outdoor’ and hence posters seem to get slightly ignored.

The paradox of course is that Cameron’s infamous ‘airbrushed’ poster has been the story of the election so far, and there may yet be the traditional ‘battle of the posters’ as we get closer and closer to polling day. Posters remain a potent way to distil an idea or a thought down, and that will never go away. Interestingly though, many of the ones we will see will only run a few times, in selected sites, and the parties will rely on media coverage to turn them into ‘stories’. And it seems, already, that electronics will play a far greater role in this election than ever before.

So, what’s next?

I think in design we’ll see a continued move to more DIY, limited edition runs. The ‘designer poster’ may go through a period when its only job is to decorate a wall, and its communication requirement will lessen even further.

Weirdly though, there really is a whole market out there for graphic/art posters – we’ve sold at least four hundred copies of our ‘Tree’ poster and it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more of this. People do love huge pieces of paper, they always have, and perhaps we’ll all start being more honest with ourselves about this.

Last year there was the phenomenon of US designers creating posters for Obama – they just felt that they should. When you went to the site, you could just print out the pdfs at whatever size you wanted – the site visitor became the user/printer and even decided what size they wanted to make their ‘print’.

I keep coming back to the fact that all of the huge identity schemes we do now are almost always applied out onto posters in the early iterations – it remains one of the quickest ways to see if a headline, a picture and a logo can co-exist in an intriguing and memorable way. Even if it only continues to exist as a hypothetical exercise, it’s an exercise worth doing.

When taxi-drivers ask me what I do, to save long-winded explanations I usually say ‘logos, posters and stamps’. When you think about it, the common design link between all three is the need to communicate something very quickly with the minimum of means. Sure, one of them can be the size of a wall, and the others the size of a thumb-print, but I see no difference in the way I design any of them.

I once used to carry my portfolio around on slide, hoping for projectors when I arrived for interviews but quickly being reduced to a small lightbox (if I was lucky). Those years carrying a miniature portfolio proved to me that all ideas could be viewed 35mm across, irrespective of their actual, physical size. And all the great graphic designers whose work I carefully studied when younger were all consummate poster designers: Fletcher, Glaser, Scher. It was a right of passage to try and become half decent at designing them myself.

Zappaterra’s recent article on poster design, which draws on some of this conversation, appears in this week’s Design Week magazine.

‘To lexicographers it’s just the 15th letter of the English alphabet. To designers it’s a perfect shape for treatment: a world, a ball, a ring, a sun, a moon, a clock, a compass, a face. It’s not even just a letter; it’s a number, too – if zero counts as a number. It’s a solid sphere or an empty circle’.

John Crace discusses and dissects the letter ‘O’ in today’s Guardian newspaper, with some additional insights from johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson.

At the end of last week we made a flying visit to Berlin. An evening and a morning was spent in good company discussing human rights (and the branding thereof), a few brief hours were snatched in the afternoon seeing ‘the sights’.

Truth is, looking back at the photos, you can see why one sage once quipped that Berlin was in danger of becoming the ‘remorse capital’.

Trying to keep costs down, we stayed in the Easyhotel, whose rooms are only inches wider than the bed. (Don’t turn over too quick else you’ll smack your head on the wall).

The corridor lights are programmed to only light up when there’s someone there.

The TV shows were kind of de-constructed.

The caferia is, er, this.

And whatever you do, don’t ask for another pillow.

Kind of like one of those cute capsule hotels. Without the cute.

After we’d put the world’s human rights to, er, right, we toured the newish ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe’, the phenomenal outdoor sculpture originally by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra (before Serra pulled out) that endured years of controversy before finally making it into the world in 2005.

Then it had to be a visit to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, frustratingly unfinished last time we were here in the late nineties. Quite something to finally see it, but we can see why so many people preferred to view it empty.

200,000 people famously visited the space before it actually had any exhibits in it, such is the power of Libeskind’s architectural vision. (For readers interested in career paths and what things people did when in their lives, this was Libeskind's first major international building in 1999. He was 52).

Then of course we stocked up on textbooks and a ripping yarn on The Berlin Wall.

We’re going to need back-to-back epsiodes of Glee to cheer up after this trip.

In case you haven’t seen, our recent piece on the RCA’s leadership debate has been re-blogged here on the Creative Review blog. There’s some interesting stuff in the comment string.

This week is a pretty important one for the future of graphic design in the UK.

This is the week that the Royal College of Art, the world’s only post graduate art and design school, interviews a shortlist of candidates to run its Communication Art and Design course.

This course emerged over a decade ago when its now retiring head, Dan Fern, combined the illustration and graphics courses. On the surface, Fern’s legacy is a series of world-famous alumni who have pushed the boundaries of their chosen specialisms, and there’s no denying that every 2 or 3 years the course supplies perfectly formed groups of designers and illustrators ready to reach for new heights.

Groups like GTF, the Why Nots and Fuel. Designers like Jonathan Barnbrook and Daniel Eatock, illustrators like Sarah Fanelli… …all RCA alumni. But everyone in that list graduated over a decade ago (some of them two decades) and the list of greatest hits has seemed a little threadbare since. RCA graphics graduates now seem to aim lower, are happy to knock out a few interesting typefaces, maybe do the odd leaflet or book for an art show, or a poster for the Tate. Many fall into teaching, either at like minded colleges or the RCA itself.

As one well known ex-student commented to me ‘in recent years I’ve struggled to get excited by the RCA Communications shows’, and that view is shared by many.

Taken in isolation, some of the shows have been intriguing, but when surrounded by incredible work on display elsewhere this department has sometimes seemed overshadowed. The architecture show is always guaranteed to make you question the world we live in. The world’s car designers are snapped up immediately by manufacturers, and immediately start work on the world’s next cars. The product and textiles shows are always an eye-opening advertisement for two more years of post graduate thinking surrounded by the best of the best.

The key issue that has distracted the course for decades has been ‘art’. Communications graduates have been at pains to present their work within the context of white walled galleries, not grubby old commerce. Work has often been presented as ‘work in progress’, never finished. The ‘process’ has become the king, not the problem to be solved. With the movement of the ‘real art’ departments to the Battersea site, this art-lite stance will become even harder to maintain, and feels increasingly at odds with the other design departments which view their industries as essential and valued partners, not hated adversaries.

The roots of this was the self-immersion/self expression phase of British design prevalent in the nineties, fuelled by then-zeitgeist collective Tomato. This found an eager audience in South Kensington. Rightly or wrongly, a collection of part-time tutors were gathered to support the course with performance, video art, experimental film and art specialisms. Coupled with the merger of the traditional disciplines, the ground was laid for a new generation of crossover graphic artists to bloom. But they haven’t. By all accounts the department is just as silo-ridden as it ever was. If you don’t believe there’s an art bias, just a brief interrogation of the department’s website reveals that of the dozen or so current MPhil and PhD students, the vast majority describe themselves as artists (and only two as graphic designers).

In the meantime, the better undergraduate courses like Glasgow, Kingston and St Martins (in the UK) have successfully incorporated these ‘conceptual’ leanings into their courses, whilst still producing graduates capable of the basics of craft and typography. Students from these courses may not glean much more from two more years at college, apart from more room to experiment, and have often chosen simply to start work and get on with their lives. Courses such as Brighton’s have managed to show that it is possible to run graphics and illustration courses together and have produced some genuinely intriguing work in the process. As a contrast, LCC (itself now resolutely anti-commerce) has aligned itself strongly to the RCA’s new mission, supplied coach-loads of graduates to the course as a result and revels in their new position as the RCA’s ‘feeder’.

Meanwhile, post-grad courses are the only growth area left in education and are springing up on a monthly basis – soon the ‘MA in design’ might be as ubiquitous as an ‘A star at A-level’. In short, there’s a lot of competition and the RCA needs to clarify exactly why a student should spend two more years there. At present it’s pretty blurry, apart from avoiding a recession-hit industry just a little longer and the undoubted kudos of those letters after your name.

And this resolutely anti-commerce stance has begun to grate. Even some of its most famous alumni like Daniel Eatock need the support of a Big Brother project to stay fiscally stable. As the country inches out of recession, surely now is the time to leave ‘art’ to the highly qualified ‘proper’ art departments and look elsewhere for inspiration.

So, where next exactly? Everyone’s hope is that a ‘name’ graphic designer will put themselves forward, with both a vision for the course and a coherent plan of how to stay a ‘name’ if 3 days a week (if not more) is to be spent firefighting in Albertopolis. Conversely, since it is still seen as the plum job in design education, several well-known educationalists will have put themselves forward. They will be undoubtedly be able to prove their committee-hardened targets-and-teaching nous, but might struggle to present themselves as the next Dumbar or Birdsall, previous professors on the course who may not have lasted long but brought much of that desired status to the course.

Where the new head will stand on online media and the convergence of disciplines will be crucial – if the course is to stand as a living, breathing figurehead of creative communications that understands art but isn’t beholden to it, then surely some digital savvy will really help. The industry also looks to it as a guide through the critical aspects of design, and design theory. But this doesn’t mean to say that retreating into textbooks, ‘research methodology’ and ‘critical discourse’ is the answer – you could argue that over-theorising has got it into this mess and what it needs now is some timely, 21st century problems for its students to solve, not another essay to write. Just a glance at the work of the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Foundation shows what designers can achieve when they apply their minds to issues, not to art.

Most simply wish that the course would remember how to communicate again, not obfuscate. And to rediscover its ambition – RCA graduates shouldn’t be happy with a typeface and the odd museum poster, they should want to redesign the museums themselves, from the ground up.

Perhaps the last word should go to one of its current students: ‘I think what it boils down to is that there is an unbelievable amount of talent in one place on Communication Art & Design at the RCA, and I think the new head needs to have a clear and exciting vision on what to do with this raw material.’

Absolutely. We wait with interest.

By Michael Johnson.

Several students, tutors and alumni gave their views for this piece, but most requested anonymity, which has been respected.

Quiet music, comfort eating and plentiful Nurofen are the order of the day at johnson banks today, after last night’s Design Week awards.

Whilst our new logo for the Pew Center was shortlisted and sadly got no further...

...our unusual scheme of barrel art for single malt whisky Glenfiddich won the temporary exhibitions category. We’ll admit to being a little surprised, since the five typographic wood and steel pieces certainly stretch the definition of what an ‘exhibition’ is, but we’re happy with that.

Our congratulations to the only double winners of the evening, Purpose, and the Royal Mail for winning for the third year in a row with their British Design Classics stamps, designed by HGV.

There’s a full shortlist here and the winners page is here.

And here are some of the obligatory dodgy pictures gathered across the evening. Some sort of ‘glasses’ theme, it seems. It seemed funny at the time.

We find ourselves strangely inundated with fresh enquiries about our tree poster.

It seems that it’s featured on the achingly hip home and product website*, Design Sponge, featured in the apartment of a Ms Vynsie Law. Her rather nice pad in Hollywood Heights, East Dallas, features the poster as you can see. What great taste, Vynsie.

Here’s a few more snaps. Never realised East Dallas was so groovy.

Go here for more interiors. Go here to find out more about the poster.

Want to buy one? Email lizzie [at] johnsonbanks [dot] co [dot] uk

*Not a sentence we anticipated writing

The latest offering from Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit’s Under Consideration franchise is their portfolio book, Flaunt. It mixes questions and answers with established designers about what they expect from a portfolio, with images and examples of how a collection of younger designers present their work.

Scattered within are carefully designed information pages that help prospective job-seekers decide how many examples of work to include in their book, how long the interview might last, and so on. Given that portfolio advice is the one thing that students value the most, this could be a smart and valuable addition to many reading lists very soon.

On this side of the Atlantic, my first reaction is that some of the portfolios seem a little bit over the top. But that could just be cultural differences - perhaps things are a little more understated over here.

Anyone turning up at johnson banks towers with a folio that looks like more effort went into its hand-tooled binding mechanism than the work itself might set off a few alarm bells. But the vast majority of our pre-hiring and screening is now done electronically (ie via pdf, or online), so when we see the actual person we know the work and are more likely to be judging the person, not the binding.

Conversely, I’m pretty sure that the world’s design students preparing their foray into the job market this summer (or middleweights waiting to re-enter when things pick-up) will appreciate a book full of different approaches to a common conundrum.

The Q&A with established designers is very revealing: the authors posed 9 questions to 17 designers from around the world, such as ‘How many pieces would you say make the perfect portfolio?’ or ‘What would you say are the most common mistakes made in portfolios and presentations?’ Yes, the usual respondents are there, such as Bierut, Shaughnessy and Sagmeister, but they’re there because they usually have something interesting to say.

Here’s Stefan Sagmeister on his first portfolio: ‘Oh no, that one is long, long gone. It was a gigantic 30 x 40-inch piece of shit. I had lots of printed posters that I couldn’t bear to fold in half. It quickly proved to be an incredible schlep up and down subway steps. I think I took it out twice, and then gave it up and moved onto something more portable’.

And Michael Bierut on the best portfolio he’s ever seen: ‘About a year into my first job, a new graduate, one year younger than myself, dropped off his portfolio. My boss had all of us look at it. It was the best portfolio I’d ever seen, absolutely perfect in terms of design, craft, and stylistic and technical virtuosity. It made me want to give up the game. It belonged to a kid named Clement Mok, who went on to become design director of Apple Computer, founder of Studio Archetype and Sapient, and a president of the AIGA’.

In true Under Consideration style, there’s an unusual and practical spin to the actual release itself – in the way that their admirable tome last year Graphic Design Referenced simply included drawings of old, famous and almost clichéd pieces of work (because the cost of reprinting them would have been too prohibitive) the twist this time is that the book is available either as a printed tome or a downloadable pdf. Opt for ‘pdf’ and it’s a mere $15 (that’s just £9.69 at today’s rates). Considering that you’re bound to glean several useful tips, which could clinch the next job, that’s ten quid well spent, I’d say.

By Michael Johnson.
There’s more information on this release here.

Regular visitors to this web address will know that we’re interested in why people become graphic designers, given that it’s a fairly unusual career path (and no-one seems to give the same answer twice).

We’ve been asking friends and tutors this question for some time, and Rebecca Wright, course director of Kingston’s Graphics + Photography course has just asked her 3rd year students.

Here are some of their answers, filled in anonymously on small pieces of yellow paper.

Good stuff. But who is Kimm Stevens?

Late last year we applied some of our ‘Phonetikana’ thoughts to some T-shirt designs for Uniqlo, and we’ve just found out that one of them has been shortlisted.

Now, bear in mind this is not really a shortlist, more of a longlist of er, 200. Also please bear in mind that we weren’t really concentrating when we sent the design and apparently it’s got something to do with the Cannes festival, hence the preponderance of dodgy Lion designs (note to selves: next time read the brief properly).

Anyway, eventually the favoured 20 or so will become t-shirts and the world’s groovy young things will be seen sporting them. Or something like that.

You could vote? If you want. Only if you want. No pressure. Honest.

Here are some of our other favourites.

Phonetikana is a typeface we’ve developed that integrates phonetic sounds with the Japanese Katakana script. So the Japanese for ‘soo-pa-hee-roh’ is written in the style of the logo at the top of this post.

There’s more information here.

Last week poor old Men at Work, eighties Australian songsmiths, came a bit of a cropper in the copyright courts when a Sydney court ruled that yes, the flute solo from ‘I come from a land down under’ did sound a little too close to the campfire favourite, ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum tree’ (and actually, if you hum it to yourself, it is pretty close).

It’s hardly big news that a piece of music sounds like another (after all, if you can only choose from 12 notes, some similarity is almost guaranteed) and there are many examples of this happening before - George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and The Chiffons' He's So Fine being a classic example.

What surprised me a little was that the original ‘Kookaburra...’ was written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, a teacher and girl guide leader. Even taking into account the fact that Men at Work’s hit came 5 decades later, it seems that they had infringed the rights of the music, and the late Marion Sinclair herself, since the copyright to her ditty continues for 70 years after her death (in 1988), so until 2058, to be precise.

It made me wonder what copyright rules exist in the visual arts, since I was under the impression that there was a 50-year cut-off. It seems that various principles apply.

For sound recordings and broadcasts, copyright expires after 50 years. For film, it’s 70 years so if you’re at film school now and want to rip-off some noir black and white classics, make sure they were made before 1940.

In writing (classed as ‘literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works’) copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death, so Salinger’s classic will stay ‘his’ for another 69 years.

In design? It seems that logo designs would be probably be deemed ‘artistic’ and would also be subject to various registrations/trademarking. But, yes, if you own one of those ‘1930s trademarks and symbols’ books, you could in theory now plunder at will.

The really interesting one though is work deemed as ‘Typographical arrangement of published editions’. To a graphic designer I think that means ‘layout’. How long? Just a pifflling 25 years. So, do the maths - any design layout designed before 1985 that can’t be deemed artistic is now theoretically copyright free (not the photographs or illustrations contained of course) but the overall layout of elements.

How about this from 1983? Up for grabs.

Some 80s Neville Brody? Anybody’s.

The entire Nova back catalogue? In theory, out of copyright.

The entire contents of Typographica? Or continual typo favourite Typomundus (see here, here and here).

What a weird discovery. I’m pretty sure I don't think this is a good thing.

By Michael Johnson. There’s some useful legal stuff here. Thanks to Ed Taylor for the legal pointers.

It’s hard to believe that it’s still less just a week since the iPad was launched. Steve Jobs says it’s like ‘holding the internet in your hands’. Critics have compared it to Barack Obama, as living up to impossible expectations (or not). Bloggers have (mainly) savaged it, but they of course savaged the iPhone too. Stephen Fry, somewhat breathlessly, thinks Jack Bauer will want to return just to download schematics onto it. The Economist has gone all religious on us, and whilst asserting that ‘some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them’ has declared that ‘even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles’. So there.
 
Meanwhile, UK advertising’s weekly bible, Campaign, asked johnson banks’ Michael Johnson to review it, from a design perspective. Here’s what he thought.
 
It’s a little tricky to review the iPad without actually having one in my hands. But, assuming that ringing doorbell is the FedEx man or an Amazon parcel (not a review copy from Jobs and Ive), I’ll try to do it, virtually.
 
From a product design perspective it’s clearly an extension of recent Apple themes. It shares the black and aluminium aesthetic that runs through their entire product line. It’s very thin – amazingly only 1mm thicker than an iPhone.
 
Size-wise, it initially disappoints (I’d hoped for something closer to A5), but to get an idea, fold your edition of Campaign in half, hold it upright and imagine that you’d lopped another 30mm off the bottom. (Or, if you’re a designer, fold Design Week in half, hold it upright and add an inch to the width)
 
The weight of it will be great. I’m writing this on a 15inch laptop, weighing almost 2.5 kg – the iPad will only weigh just over a quarter of that. If you want to cycle and run (or amble) to work, or are always dragging hefty laptops to meetings and airports, it could be a genuine game changer. And it’ll save on those physio sessions for broken shoulders.
 
If your idea of fun on a long flight is to boot up Photoshop and indulge in a bit of high end retouching then you’ll be disappointed, but you’d imagine that Adobe will be thinking hard about ‘CS 4 lite’ very soon.
 
Our Californian friends have been mainly re-purposing iPhone software for this new ‘third-way’ type of product (ie not phone, not laptop, but somewhere in-between). Put 6 iPhones together and you’re close to the size of the actual screen - you can see why the world’s suppliers of apps and games are genuinely excited. We’ve all done that irritating up-and-down-sizing of a website on a phone – all of that will be over if it’s as fast and as net-friendly as it seems in all the demos.
 
The family-friendly apps like photos, calendars and video have been re-designed for the bigger screen, but this isn’t just a home toy – the increasingly ubiquitous Keynote software has been re-jigged and made available at a very low price. You could do that next conference defiantly ‘hand-luggage only’. Forget the extra iPods and hardbacks, just whack the music on this, download some Malcolm Gladwell ebooks and order the room service.
 
My only reservation? Will I really be able to write on that keyboard? I hope so. But I’ll need a real one in my hands to really test that out, obviously. Purely for research, you understand.

Obviously 2009 was a tricky year for lot of people, so what better way to cleanse all that away and drive away the evil spirits for the coming year. Cue Setsubun at johnson banks.

Essentially the toshiotoko, or male head of the household...

...gets to grab handfuls of roasted soyabeans...

...and rather than eat them, chucks them at the rampaging ogres, shouting ‘Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!’ (‘Demons out! Luck in!’).

Then you can pig out on the soyabeans, but only one for each year of your life. (Not sure about this rule, seems a little stingy to us.)

If you're looking for an easier option, the Maneki Neko (or Beckoning Cat) should bring your business good luck. (The cat's beckoning, not waving, by the way).

So, there you go. Roasted soya-bean-chucking and a small cat = new business coming out of your ears. Or something like that.

A serious new year clear-up has made us realise just how many posters we have in the archive that we designed for La Villette. Over a seven year period from 2000 to 2007, we designed hundreds of items every year for the cultural park in the north-east of Paris.

A great project to work on, and the highlight was the posters - major events each had their own bespoke designs, 1.5 metres tall and a metre wide.

We’re not entirely sure how many we did, probably hundreds, but it’s struck us as we sort through them that there must be between thirty and fifty of them that are pretty reasonable.

We think they’d make a great exhibit of some description, but we’d need a huge space to do it.

Then it occurred that our Thought for the Week readers might have some suggestions?

Long shot, obviously, but if you're interested in exhibiting 50 massive French cultural posters, or know someone who might, drop us a line at info(at)johnsonbanks(dot)co(dot)uk. Ta.

This post from a while ago shows some of the highlights of the series.

The past week has seen various attempts by team johnson banks to get away from our desks and banish those January blues.

We were there for the end of ‘Skate’ at Somerset House, practicing our synchronised skating routines.

They’re coming on pretty well.

After that came a visit to the Science Museum for its monthly ‘Late’ night where children are banned, there are four bars and 3,000 twenty-and-thirty-somethings descend on one of London’s favourite institutions. They’ve become amazingly popular evenings.

In between discussing quantum physics over Bacardi breezers (or maybe the quantum physics of a Bacardi breezer), there are chances to visit Launch Pad without tripping over the buggies, discover whether its lifts really can hold 24 people...

...do the quiz night and enter the colouring in competition. Runners-up in that, sadly. Must try harder.

Late last year we were asked to make some notes and gather some images on how our Beatles stamps came about. We duly did what we were asked and collated some images, assuming it would maybe a page of text and some little pictures.

Consequently, there’s some surprise at johnson banks towers that the piece is, er, 6 pages long. Interspersed with proper images there are what were tiny scribbles of unsuccessful routes (like ‘exploring lyrics’) blown up a little larger than expected. Whoops. Still. Looks OK. Ish.

The piece appears in the January Edition of Computer Arts projects magazine.

Regular Thought for the week readers will know that there is a music/guitar/jazz/geek theme running just under the surface here, so this is a quick detour to preview Pat Metheny’s new project, called The Orchestrion.

By rigging up electronic solenoids attached to hammers and mallets (and then to computer composition software), he’s devised a way to arrange and trigger a vast array of musical instruments, including a loaned drumkits from Jack de Johnette, a vibraphone from Gary Burton and a whole heap of weird stuff including tuned water bottles.

Then he’s a composed a series of tracks that are played ‘live’ by this phenomenal one-man orchestra, with him the only actual human allowed in the band.

Sounds like a potential disaster, but from the previews so far, it’s quite something, albeit tricky to describe. Best watch this YouTube piece if you’re interested.

Or play this to hear the music.

The album is out in a matter of days, and a world tour kicks off any minute, with one solitary date in London at the Barbican on the 10th of February. Can’t wait.

Late last year we finished the first phases of a major rebrand for the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia.

They approached us in 2008 to help them re-organise themselves under a new name, whilst finding a way to recognise the various initiatives that were being brought together.

This is how the various elements presented themselves before.

Although they wanted at one level to present themselves as a unified ‘Pew Center’, they still wanted to show that they worked across dance, exhibitions, arts fellowships, theatre, management, heritage and music, all within the Philadelphia area. And they wanted to let their initiatives sometimes still use their current names. What you might describe as a tricky brief.

After a lengthy design process, we started thinking of the centre and its constituent parts a little like ‘cards’ that we could shuffle and reorganize – the part you wanted to represent was simply the one ‘on top’. But, crucially, we allowed glimpses of the other initiatives to peek out behind the main card.

In terms of the main logo, it has three states, as below, depending on what level of detail the organisation wants to portray.

Then there are several other ‘states’ of the logo, where the elements re-arrange themselves to leave the initiative name on top, and a minimised Pew Center square.

We’ve developed several animations to help explain their new structure.

Here’s the animation for the whole centre.

And these are variants on the theme for exhibitions...

...and fellowships.

For the website the new identity becomes a live navigation device (see grabs below and the actual site is here).

Allied to the core identity idea, we’ve been designing and art directing a series of applications, from ram-punched brochures…

…to invites and concertina leaflets.

There’s signage for the head office, visual thoughts for DVD’s and films, even full sets of printed stationery.

The end of the year meant Christmas party invites and, unbeknownst to us, they gave out logo tattoos at the do. Now that’s a first.

Thanks to the centre for a great project.

Also thanks to our various collaborators on this project, including Ross Cooper on animations and Happy Cog Philadelphia on the website.

Some progress images on the Ravensbourne project we’re working on. Here are some shots of the Penrose tessellating tiles being applied to the outside of the new building.

As someone quipped on a recent site visit, ‘it’s like the biggest jigsaw puzzle you’ve ever seen’.

As well as working on the overall brand and identity, we’re also giving some thought to the internal wayfinding. Even after 3 site visits we’re still scratching our heads a bit over this one: inside it’s a maze of interlocking floors and gangways. 

Here’s a side view of a typical floor - you can see how the circular windows work like giant portholes.

More soon. The identity should be showable by the Spring...

Ever since the nineties and the advent of cyberspace, futuregazers have been quick to pronounce the death of ink on paper.

After all, take a quick look around the design world and ask yourself which sectors have a secure future? Branding? Almost certainly. Digital? Er, yes. Animation? Of course. Product and 3d? Absolutely.
 
As a contrast, just a quick scan of the ink-based sectors reveals the slow death of traditional media - The poor Observer’s demise is predicted on a weekly basis. The Guardian’s midweek sales are by all accounts terrible. Blogs can showcase, discuss and dissect new ideas weeks, even months before journals. In the next few years we’ll see if the Kindle will put a torch to those paperbacks that gather dust on our shelves.

And the pace of change will only get greater: the most heard client request last year? ‘Can you show me what it will look like on an iPhone?’ Not many of them say ‘I know, let’s do this as a limited edition foil blocked book’.
 
There’s probably now a clear age-divide over print versus digital. Designers over 35 were drawn into the profession by traditional means – album covers, posters and club flyers, messing about in the screenprinting department at school. Generation Y (or whatever letter we’re up to now) has been using and abusing Powerpoint for a decade at school or dabbled with their MySpace backgrounds. ‘Album covers’ are now 50 pixel-wide pictures on their iPods, not gatefold cardboard experiences. Digital ‘stuff’ is home, not away and it’s unlikely that they’re drawn to design via traditional means. ‘Doing a nice bit of print’ is more a creative curiosity rather than a craving.

At the turn of the last decade, many of London’s design companies still treated ‘print’ as the bedrock of their business. Designing annual reports was both creatively excellent and profitable, now they are on-line pdfs. A statement such as ‘let’s do a series of posters for this project’ would be met with enthusiasm and interest - now clients will just grin politely and change the subject. Or just ask ‘why?’

Entire corporate identities can be designed, detailed and virtually artworked before someone asks – ‘hang on, what about the stationery’. The dreaded phrase ‘electronic stationery’ has taken over, a process best summarised as one where your favourite layouts are radically re-interpreted (ok, destroyed) by the blunt instrument that is Microsoft Won’t (sorry, Word).
 
For some, adjusting to the change has taken time. In the nineties, johnson banks would produce dozens, sometimes hundreds, of posters a year. Sixty by forty inches remains a favourite size, and the receiving of the proofs, the smelling of the ink? Fantastic. We all learned from the masters and virtually every one of them (Hoffman, Brockmann, Fletcher, Glaser) built careers around getting ink onto paper via the poster.

But if printed stuff really is dead, either someone hasn’t told us or the message is taking a heck of a long time to get through. Bookshelves groan with new magazines, specialist shops like London’s Magma and Amsterdam’s Nijhof and Lee are stuffed to the gunnels with new design books, every month. Magma even opened their third shop, specialising in graphic ephemera and general printed curiosities, and it’s survived the recession.
 
Some sectors still need printed things – in education the students check out prospective Universities online, but their parents still like a glossy prospectus for the coffee table, and if tens of thousands of pounds are being committed to an education, you can’t blame them. In other cases, ‘print’ seems to be becoming much more DIY. When producing ‘things’ for V&A fetes and xmas cards we’ve unearthed new and unexpected sources of income. An old and infamous poster on the ‘life of a graphic designer’ has been reprinted three times - sales of it must be up to three or four hundred, and counting.

It’s no coincidence that Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook have started  their own publishing enterprise – they’ve judged that there’s still a market for the kind of book that they love and would want to buy themselves. They can print as few or many as needed, and if the books prove viable probably pocket more than the standard ‘5% of net’ royalty that induces depression in most budding design authors.

This move to self-publishing and production will probably continue. If posters just become big pieces of paper held up on design blogs for other designers to coo at, that’s not really viable. But if they buy them? Well, why not?

American designers last year found a way to support Obama by uploading their poster designs digitally for people to print out at whatever size they wished and now the designs have been collected in a book from Taschen. A neat way to preserve an art form on-line, and move it into the 21st century.
 
We’re going to see more of this. Print may have been toppled from the top of the design tree, but it isn’t going to go quietly.

 
This is an adaptation of a recent article by Michael Johnson for Design Week. Illustrations by Miho Aishima

Late last year we were asked by well known Japanese design and business magazine Brain if we would propose a cover for the magazine, on the theme of colour.

We were given the colour blue. After a bit of searching, we decided to make more use of our Phonetikana typeface which we unveiled last year.

The word ‘blue’ written in Katakana is prounounced ‘boo-roo’. This set us off thinking about western images associated with those sounds, which led to ghosts and kangaroos. Obviously.

Here’s some pics from a spread about us inside.

OK so it’s a terrible cliché but you know, sometimes we do keep to them. So, rather than embarrassing anyone personally, here are our collective New Year’s resolutions (in no particular order).

Pass my driving test

Learn to use Garageband

Learn to use Logic

Learn to play the Saxophone (again)

Stop biting our nails

Be less pushy

Get a serious boyfriend by late summer

Plan a wedding

Give up smoking (again)

Learn how to tile

Sleep more and tile the bathroom

Make our other halves happier

Start writing a diary

Write another book

Learn to write Japanese

Learn French

Move house

Do a talk about design and guitars whilst playing the saxophone 

Start life drawing lessons

Build a Ukelele

Learn to play the Ukelele

Write happier posts on the blog

There you go. Doddle.

Update: also, ‘Do better work’ (same resolution every year) and ‘re-do our website’. Yes, it’s about time.

We’re still catching up with ’09 posts really - perhaps we haven’t genuinely committed to the New Year yet?

Here’s a great typographic advent calendar that our last rather good placement Jo made us as a Christmas present. Lovely idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to see these on-sale in November rather than the usual nonsense.

Those with good memories may recall that funny/interesting/edible placement presents are becoming a recurring theme.

Apologies, a hectic end to ’09 and an equally hectic Xmas break mean this review is now SO last year. But, anyway, on with it, the third time we’ve done this and this year with multiple suggestions from our loyal readers, thank you.

So, in no particular order..

The ‘wish we’d done that’ projects of the year
One of our personal favourites has to be this Japanese meat label packaging by To Genko.

The white food labels are specially printed to detect ammonia and darken when meat begins to go off. This means that a dark blue label = ‘off meat’, but the really clever bit is that the bar code is also nullified so it can’t be sold. Genius. And genuinely useful too.

Everyone rightly loves these Dixons ads by M&C Saatchi, and what a great endline (Dixons – the last place you want to go). Brilliant. Will scoop every gong going.

Several people have suggested Alan Clarke’s Olympic posters. It’s interesting that a student project on the Olympics has gathered more praise than the ‘real’ Olympics work on the logo and now its equally controversial symbols.

Designer of the year
Well, we have to go with J Abott Miller in Pentagram’s New York Office. Here’s just a few of the projects he was involved in last year.

Brand success with possibly the world’s worst logo
Nominated by Stephen Taylor as a good logo, but we think he’s joking - Brawn GP. What looks like it was designed over a weekend ended up being plastered all over the Championship winning car for precisely one year. How anyone decided that the ‘BR’ should be roman and the ‘AWN’ italicised is beyond us.

Proof, perhaps, that a terrible logo will not slow your car down one little bit. One in the eye for design effectiveness, perhaps.

What’s happening in blogville?
Whilst the established blogs like the Creative Review blog and Designboom still deliver the goods, since its re-design Design Observer feels less and less like required reading. Why is that? Within the niche world of branding and re-branding, Brand New continues to showcase the most interesting developments and manages, just about, to keep its commentators under a degree of moderation. Design Assembly should be encouraged too (but maybe it needs to lighten up a bit this year?)

Several blogs we won’t name-check have virtually lapsed completely into constant self-promotion. In difficult times this is probably understandable but makes for pretty tedious reading. Perhaps happier times will fix this, or maybe the simple naivety of blogging is virtually over and just about everyone’s out to make a buck nowadays. Shame.

Weirdly, we’ve been having the most fun reading simple blogs dedicated to single issues. Here’s a great example: My Parents Were Awesome, dedicated to hideous (but hilarious) photos submitted by readers of their parents.

In the words of the site itself, ‘before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome’.

And the new but fantastically written ‘I am the Client’ which tracks the relationship of its hero, marketing director Dave Knockles, with his advertising agencies, trashing all reputations along the way. It’s worth reading from the oldest post up, if that makes sense (but if you’re swear-word-phobic, watch out). If you’re short of time just start with this fantastic decimation of the whole concept of ‘the agency planner’. Genius.

Richard Heap wrote and suggested Letters of note, which is new to us, but looks great and will hastily go into our news readers.

On a slightly weirder note, how about this, Post Secret, consisting of secrets sent anonymously on postcards.

Back to design, a newcomer to this blogging malarky is Sean Adams’s ‘burning settlers cabin’ which, despite its odd title, turns out to be a hilarious ramble through the mind of one of California’s funniest designers and the seemingly endless 50s and 60s kitsch that turns him on. Great stuff. And he has already surely broken the record for the amount of times he’s featured a picture of himself and business partner Noreen.

The ’09 chutzpah award…
…goes again to Wolff Olins for continuing to push the boundaries of identity design and getting up the noses of most of the blog commentators at the same time.

Ok, their Aol scheme might look like a scheme we’ve all presented without much hope at some point, but you know what? They got it through.

It’s a strange commentary on current identity design that one of the biggest firms often tries something new, whilst the smaller (and in theory nimbler) ones often don’t. Odd.

Ad of the year
Even UK advertising’s most esteemed organ, Campaign, described 2009 as an ‘annus horriblis’ for advertising, by refusing to nominate an agency of the year which, for a creative sector especially skilled at congratulating itself, says quite a bit. It’s tough though, isn’t it, to think of great ads you’ve seen this year? We’ve already mentioned the Dixons campaign, and we’re going to go with those Meerkats again, slightly out of desperation.

Music of the year
Going on the simple rule of ‘most played in the office’ then the albums of the year would have to be Grizzly Bear (Veckatimest), The Animal Collective (Merriweather Post Pavilion), Bat for Lashes (Two Suns), Florence and the Machine (Lungs), Passion Pit (Manners) and the Dark was the Night compilation. And it’s only a month old but we’re already loving Them Crooked Vultures.

For the more niche music-heads, our doom-rock instrumental-post-rock band of the year has to be Russian Circles. Our metal album of the year was Mastodon’s Cracke the Skye. Blues album of the year? Matt Schofield. Are we getting too niche now? Maybe. The online music breakthrough of the year had to be Spotify. But you already knew that.

The ‘F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me’ award
Single of the year was looking tricky (Passion Pit’s Little Secrets?) then got very easy – Rage against the Machine’s victory over the Simon Cowell (s)hit factory.

A carefully orchestrated internet campaign stopped the UK Christmas chart topper being the X-Factor winner (for potentially the fourth year). Never was a chorus so appropriate.

Book of the year
Well, we’ve had some hugely varying nominations, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the new compilation of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures. In design we’ve enjoyed Graphic Design, Referenced by Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Unit Edition’s first foray, Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio (but gee, that type is small).

An interesting nomination came from Jacob Pover for Massimo Vignelli's 'The Vignelli Canon', up until now only available as a pdf download (but a real version is on its way in 2010).

The trends of the year
Overall, everyone’s still talking about Barack Obama, Steven Fry’s tweets and MP’s expenses (here’s a picture submitted by Richard Holt).

Oh, and Flashmobbing adverts.

Christopher Skinner thinks the design trend of the year is hand drawn/scribbled fonts and suggests that our Save the Children work had something to do with it… maybe…

Matthew Day suggests the 'Papercraft' trend as design trend of the year. ‘It’s annoyed the hell out of me because so many of the examples of it have been brilliant and I am insanely jealous’. Stephen Walker is looking forward to better web typography in 2010 thanks to Typekit, and if what it suggests takes off then yes, typographically things could get a whole lot better in web-ville.

Most over-hyped things...
Danny Elliott has suggested The Olympic Pictograms, and we can see why. ‘I can appreciate they are hard to do but come on, they are awful. But then again, I said that about the logo, but I like that now. It’s no easy task designing somethiing that needs to be 2,3 and even 4 years ahead of itself’.

Ollie Winser is very bored of Florence and the Machine (already?).

Andrew Kingham wrote and asked that everyone stop using Rosewood (seems a bit harsh) and illustrated his point accordingly. OK, fair enough.

A graduate whose been doing the placement rounds (might keep the name quiet for now) has suggested we have a new ‘Mad about Moodboards’ award and he wants us to give it to Interbrand London. Mind you he also wants to award Interbrand with the best in-house cafeteria award too. Evens itself out really, doesn't it?

Steal of the year
Ken Li has alerted us to this great story where Leo Burnett Hong Kong scooped a grand prix at an awards scheme for their ‘sweat’ campaign that had a, er, ‘striking resemblance’ to a series of images produced by UK photographer John Ross for the Manic Street Preachers' Lifeblood album in 2004. Those images were a collaboration with art director and designer Mark Farrow.

What no-one seems to have noticed is that the John Ross photos already built on work by Giles Revell from a few more years previously. Ah well.

The ‘I really don’t need one but I’d really like one’ product of the year
We’re very excited by this product, which appears to be a miniature midi keyboard/synthesizer, we think. Very nice, can we have a beta copy please?

We’d also love one of these toasters that look like printers…

The design prediction for ‘10
Well, our notes say ‘the year Augmented reality becomes everyday’, which may well be true. But if all the rumours are correct, this will be the year of the Apple tablet.

And after a decade of lugging around not-very-portable portables, we can’t wait.

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to a better ’10.

PS We’re still thinking about the whole ‘design of the decade’ thing. Give us a bit longer to get our thoughts straight on that one…

Another highlight of a snowy New York: The High Line.

The High Line opened in the summer and runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to midtown, between 10th & 11th Avenues. The first section opened in June, and gets up to about 20th street (eventually it will run all the way to 34th street).

It was originally an elevated railway in the 30s, and was constructed a couple of stories above the street.

You get a unique view of the city from a different angle and many buildings and billboards are cropped off at unusual angles, or the track runs entirely through buildings.

The sun loungers were maybe a bit optimistic in sub-zero temperatures.

The official High Line site is here, and the flickr set has some great shots on it too.

The High Line design team was a collaboration between landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations, and architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Have been in New York for a couple of days and there are a couple of shows that can’t be missed at the Museum of Modern Art: a great show on the Bauhaus and a fantastic Tim Burton retrospective.

Over-zealous exhibition guards for the Bauhaus prevented any photography but we were determined to somehow record the Tim Burton show, crammed with examples of his life’s work from cartooning to Hollywood stop motion and full-on movie production. Not to be missed. Here are some sneakily stolen images. 

And here’s an image from the youngest Johnson’s sketchbook. Not bad Molly, not bad.

Just a quick reminder that we’re still calling for nominations for this year’s Review of the Year. We’ve already had a good splurge of emails and thoughts but we want more.

For example, one nomination for design of the decade has been the project above by William Murray Hamm. Interesting. And Nick Asbury has posted his responses online, here (obviously couldn’t wait). Here is his iconic image of the year (mmm good category) from the MP’s expenses scandal.

Here are some of things we usually cover:

The ‘wish I’d done that’ project of the year

Designer of the year

Brand of the year

Logo of the year

Blog of the year

Biggest blog disappointment

Ad of the year

Album of the year

Single of the year

Gig of the year

Book of the year

Design trend of the year

Most over-hyped person/design/blog/whatever that you can’t wait to see the back of

Worst ad or design of the year

Steal of the year

The ‘I really don't need one but I’d really like one’ product of the year

Your design/trend prediction for ‘10

Your New Year’s resolution

Ad/design of the decade

Please send your nominations to info (at) johnsonbanks (dot) co (dot) uk. Don’t worry if you can’t fill them all out, just do the ones that interest you. Feel free to invent new categories as well.

Funniest quotes used liberally, and there WILL be a prize

This year’s johnson banks xmas card is the third in the series where we have ram-punched shapes out of all the spare magazines in the office. This way we keep our green credentials ticking over, yet have a good annual clear up at the same time.

So this year. we've punched hundreds of snowmen. As ever, industry rag Design Week (ironically) punches brilliantly, but we always make sure we’ve got a good cross section to send to a cross section of friends and clients.

Here he (she?) is in action. This year we’ve allowed ourselves to punch an ‘eye’ as well.

In previous years we’ve done angels...

...and trees.

It’s that time of the year when we ask for your thoughts for the johnson banks review of the year. This will be our third go at this, following 2007 and 2008.

It’s your chance to vent your spleen about the worst ad you've seen, the biggest steal, the most-overhyped person or idea, you name it really.

It is also, of course, the chance to be cheery and positive and select your favourites of the year, whether it be design, advertising, media or music related.

In no particular order, the categories we’ve usually covered are:

The ‘wish I’d done that’ project of the year

Designer of the year

Brand of the year

Logo of the year

Blog of the year (all nominations for this one of course gratefuly accepted)

Biggest blog disappointment

Ad of the year

Album of the year

Single of the year

Gig of the year

Book of the year

Design trend of the year

Most over-hyped person/design/blog/whatever that you can’t wait to see the back of

Worst ad or design of the year

Steal of the year

The ‘I really don't need one but I’d really like one’ product of the year

Your design/trend prediction for ‘10

Your New Year’s resolution

Ad/design of the decade

Please send your nominations to info (at) johnsonbanks (dot) co (dot) uk. Don’t worry if you can’t fill them all out, just do the ones that interest you. Feel free to invent new categories as well.

Best and funniest quotes liberally used and there will definitely be a prize for the best (last year we said that, then forgot so this year we promise...)

Johnson banks’s creative director, Michael Johnson, is extensively quoted in today’s edition of London newspaper, Metro.

Discussing the 'Meerkat’ campaign developed for the price comparison site, Compare the Market, he had this to say:

"A great product or unique service makes advertising one of the easiest jobs ever– just tell the consumer what it does, why it’s great, then go home, job done. So the first iPod and first iPhone made advertising a doddle because the product WAS the ad.
 
But in markets where products seem dull and undifferentiated? Much, much trickier. A classic example is ‘market comparison’ sites - acres of green, blue and white cyberspace stuffed with endless jolly couples willing you to fritter endless unjolly hours shaving 3 quid off your car insurance.
 
Then along came a mad Russian meerkat called Aleksandr. And an annoyed and slightly victimised one at that, cross that you wanted to compare markets, not meerkats. With one slightly barmy joke (or bad pun, or slice of genius, you decide), Compare the Market has become a brand.
 
Briefed to create a campaign that linked both the words ‘compare’ and ‘market’ and somehow instill genuine love and affection, VCCP (the agency) has created a classic.
 
Have we found our turn of the decade Smash Martians or Hofmeister bear? Perhaps. Launched only last Boxing Day, Aleksandr already seems part of the zeitgeist. Enough people enjoy the joke to visit the real site and doing some actual comparing, the site is has 400% more visitors than a year ago, and our velvet-jacketed friend joins that list of characters created to sell ‘stuff’ that becomes more memorable than the stuff itself."

If you’re wondering what this is all about, or reading from abroad, go here.

Anyone even remotely connected with design education at the moment will know that MA courses (or ‘masters’) are appearing out of the blue at an alarming rate. As an educational growth area, the Universities are cashing in and it won’t be long before you can do an MA in ‘grid systems and the kerning of Akzidenz’ (followed by an Mphil in baseline grids).
 
But out of all this activity and frantic course creation comes some good. I've been banging on for years that undergrad courses aren't successfully teaching branding and then out of the blue, the LCC (London College of Communication) has started a year-long MA branding course, whose first year of students are holding their degree show this week.
 
To be fair, out of twenty or so students, maybe not all of them will walk into jobs at Wolff Olins. But it’s interesting all the same to spend an evening discussing ‘generative identity’, the apparent influence of this particular post about flexible branding trends, and seeing a handful of interesting students.

Edouard Pecher’s work was probably the stand out, especially his ever-changing logo and the stationery for the Kaai Theater.

To use his words, ‘the entire system is based on oppositions in terms of open or enclosed areas, direction, size, texture and placement. Strict rules enabled the creation of a graphic identity that is not recognised by a mark, but for its graphic style’.

I also enjoyed  Jordan Blood's work for The Leatherhead Theatre.

And Gretta Khoury’s work for an Arabic Calligraphy Musuem was tastefully done.

A good start, and an MA that could actually be genuinely valuable. Next year’s course more than doubles in size to fifty students, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes next.
 
The show is one until tomorrow (the 5th) at the LCC, Elephant and Castle.

By Michael Johnson

After a long day at the branding coalface we were close to a no-show at last night’s big do, but luckily we dragged ourselves to the opening of the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the V&A.

Seven years in reconstruction, a entire wing of the Museum has been changed, from the original sculpture section to those weird old dingy basement galleries on the right that you only noticed briefly as you searched for the loo. Now 2,000 of the museum’s greatest treasures are re-presented in an overwhelming great series of galleries and spaces, over four floors. If you thought the re-jig of the The British Galleries (earlier in the decade) was impressive, this will blow your socks off. It’s that good.

Right from the start where you’re faced by our favourite Giambologna*, it’s a roller-coaster ride through a thousand years of artifacts.

There’s one especially great bit where the gaps between walls of old wings and walls of the old galleries open up into a triple height space.

As you meander down this narrow section, admiring monks...

...you realise that hanging on the far wall is the front of a house dating from the 1600s. Amazing.

Here are more images hastily camera-phoned last night.

We’ve been tracking the project for most of the decade out of interest. What seems like eons ago we were asked to pitch to do the graphics. At a certain point, when asked if we REALLY wanted to artwork 1,900 captions, we must have blanched slightly (so didn’t get it), but we can report that the graphics looked great. We especially liked these gold leaf ones.

Highly, highly recommended.

The Medieval and Renaissance Galleries are open now, and are on permanent display, so free entry for all.

* we’ve been fond of this sculpture ever since we featured it in this poster for the V&A a decade ago.

It’s long been noted that the typeface Trajan (based on the inscriptions on Trajan’s column) has become Hollywood and American TV’s favourite typeface. It’s solid. It has gravitas. It’s been around for thousands of years.

Examples: The West Wing?

Russell Crowe?

There’s even a flickr set devoted to it, 152 items strong.

But in an odd twist, Britain’s Iraq inquiry has adopted our Roman friend for its logo.

Now why or how a government inquiry ends up with its own logo is for separate debate, but perhaps they already know that someone will make a movie about it. Or the inquiry itself will last for thousands of years.

Thanks to Lexi for the tip

Also noticed last week in Beijing, this nifty customisation of your normal moped handlebars.

The woolly gloves are attached to the bars - the owner just sticks his or hands in and drives off. Neat.

For more of this type of everday anthropomorphism, visit Jan Chipchases’s marvellous ‘future-perfect’ blog here.

My brief trip to China last week was my first, ever. In the few hours off that I had, I frittered away a forgettable hour looking for Chinese guitars, but then my visit to Beijing’s Dirt Market (panjiayuan) was quite the reverse.

There are hundreds of things you can observe from this market. How appallingly cold it was, or that there are a staggering amount of stalls specialising in jade bracelets. But as I walked around with a camera, collecting images, the 33-years-dead Chinese leader, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung was following me.

Now at school I studied Mao - The Revolutionary. I mugged up on the long march and the good and bad sides to life in post-war China.

But I wasn't prepared for Mao - The Brand. Everywhere you look, he stares at you. Busts, hats, rucksacks, posters, badges, clocks, watches. It’s amazing.

Presumably there’s a substantial collectors market for this product and I eventually cracked myself, returning home with a Mao rucksack emblazoned with a classic quote, ‘Serve the People’. (I looked for one that said ‘The peoples of the world who struggle to oppose American imperialism and its running dogs will achieve the greatest victory’ - but weirdly couldn't find one).

On returning, just a quick bit of ebay searching shows that there are collectors out there happy to shell out thousands of dollars for porcelain Maos to dominate their mantlepieces.

Is this the same Mao that let millions starve during the Great Leap Forward? Perhaps. Buried hundreds of scholars alive? Quite possibly. The same Mao that watched millions more disappear during the Cultural Revolution? That’s the one.

Would we visit Rome and scour flea markets for busts of Mussolini, or rummage for SS stuff in Berlin? Do millions of tourists visit London’s Camden market each year and leave disappointed that they couldn’t buy any Margaret Thatcher memorabilia? I doubt it.

It’s hard to judge exactly how ‘New China’ truly feels about the elevation of Mao to this odd form of marketing (and therefore capitalist) sainthood. Mao’s own grand-daughter has defended ‘Brand Mao’ and the phenomenon of his face on everything: ‘It shows his influence, that he exists in people's consciousness and has influenced several generations of Chinese people's way of life. Just like Che Guevara's image, his has become a symbol of revolutionary culture. It is natural that he would be used on T-shirts or cups as a cultural logo.’

And of course, designers stroll through this market stuffed with this remarkable iconography and it’s hard not be be seduced. Who wouldn’t be by all that white red and black?

When someone told me that there’s a Mao tie-up with Coke (or was it Pepsi?) I wasn’t really surprised. But I did double-take a little.

Our 20th century revolutionary icons (Che, Lenin, Stalin and Mao) have become the faces that sell cola and t-shirts. Class struggle has become size struggle.

Available now, in S, M, L and XL.

By Michael Johnson

D&AD have kindly sent us a very nicely edited film of Michael Johnson’s Guitars and Graphics talk at this year’s Xchange conference. Here’s a brief excerpt.

There’s talk of G&G doing some northern dates early next year. We’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to Dion at D&AD for his skilful filming and editing.

Last night saw the opening of London’s most glamorous outdoor skating rink, at Somerset House.

We’ve been helping out with the branding of the event, which has a very prominent lead sponsor, Tiffany & Co.

Here are some of the applications of the work, all based on the idea of little ice-skating elves which appear out of the frost.

 And the obligatory adaptation for Somerset House’s xmas card.

Obviously last night was a chance for us to show off our new ice-skating moves too.

And in idle moments practice our hula-hooping.

Tickets and information for this year’s Skate can be found here.

I’ve just come back from Beijing where I’ve spent several days helping to judge a science, art and design competition called Dreamlab.

A brief was set to Chinese Universities by an alliance of five UK organisations (Kingston University, The Science Museum, Design Museum, Wellcome Trust, Bournemouth University) and the British Council. A cluster of judges were picked to help cull initial entries from throughout China down to the five ideas that were presented at a live final over the weekend.

The task was to create interdisciplinary teams to examine the science of sleeping and dreaming, find ways to illustrate theories and discoveries in unusual, informative (and non-sciency) ways, and present them back with slides and films. Each team had just 15 minutes to make their case.

The overall standard was pretty high - here are some highlights.

The team from Hunan University designed an immersive interactive exhibit which would explain the differences between rapid eye moment (REM) sleep, and sleep without REM, and how you would feel when awoken from different sleeping states.

A team from Southeast University picked the ‘Activation-Synthesis’ theory of dreaming (as you do), which starts to explain how your brain compiles dreams from scattered memories over a few days, how it merrily makes your dreams completely illogical and produces dreams with no actual language in them.

The team from Xiamen University proposed a vast brain-shaped exhibition stuffed with interactives that would answer these key questions.

Part of their proposal also involved a random dream generator, which would spit out varying scary stories depending on what buttons you pressed to create your dream cocktail.

China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (who presented their team photo like this, as you do)...

...looked at the interrelationship of food and dreams, and designed a three level building dedicated to exhibitions and kitchens and curated displays. This was all topped off with a hotel on the top floor where (presumably) you could test whether pigging out on chocolate and cheese just before bedtime would send you into dream-hell or not.

The eventual winner, Team 321 from Beijing Institute of Fashion and Technology, decided that they would wage a public campaign to educate people into realising that your body can fight cancers and depression in your sleep by releasing hormones and endorphins.

They took the unusual decision to dress themselves as various chemicals, both good and bad, and proposed a catwalk show as the central component of their idea. Here are some of the costumes, events and animation stills.

All a bit bonkers, but fun and involving, and the kind of idea you could see on at our own Science Museum here in London. So, a deserved winner.

All the entrants get a chance at winning scholarships to UK Universities, and as top prize Team 321 won a week over here in the spring, all expenses paid. Watch out London.

By Michael Johnson

Thanks to the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Beijing for their hospitality over the judging period. When the video presentations are up on the British Council/Dreamlab website we'll put another link up here.

Recently I was asked by a design journal to name ‘my design hero’.

For decades, I hoovered up the design and writing of what would have been my nominations, whether it was Paul Rand, Bruno Munari, or Tibor Kalman. So one hero shouldn’t have been difficult. But after a while, if you’ve read all their books and absorbed all their work, what do you do next?

More recently I seem to have stopped looking at other people’s work for inspiration - I’m more likely to be inspired by an approach, or a thought, or just a project.

A great example of a hero ‘project’ is when they curated, designed and sent records into deep space attached to the Voyager space probes, 32 years ago, which as I write (and you read) are hurtling through deep space on some unknown journey.

The records that Carl Sagan and his team compiled contained recordings of earth’s noises, voices, an image library of pictures and dozens of tracks of music that were felt to represent the finest achievements of man. A bizarre time capsule of the state of the earth in the late seventies, all carefully recorded onto a disc meant to be played at 16 rpm (this is pre digital, remember) by a stylus hidden within the spacecraft.

How they agreed on which pictures, and which recordings, are a separate tale - The Beatles said ‘yes’ to ‘Here comes the Sun’ (nice music/space pun) being included but their record company (EMI) said ‘no’ – obviously worried about deep space copyright infringement.

Why this project fascinates me is hard to pin down. The chances of any extraterrestrials scooping them up is pretty low, as is the likelihood of their being in any fit state to be played after millions of years drifting through meteor-strewn nothingness.

I think it’s the grand ambition of the project that I love - the mad schoolboy sci-fi ‘what-if?’ A bunch of astro-science-hippes persuaded NASA to do it, then they just had weeks to pull it together. In terms of a project that elevates me above the everyday and the hum-drum and inspires ‘what-ifs’ of my own, it’s right up there.

This is an adaptation of a recent piece for Design Week magazine by Michael Johnson. The wiki page on the Voyager record project is a good place to start for more info. If you’re interested it’s well worth tracking down ‘Murmurs of Earth’, the book that was written about the project.

It’s the 9th of November, and those of you with longish memories will remember that 8 days ago we should have witnessed the grand unveiling of the new logo for London. But we didn’t.

So what’s happened? Well, there were 56 entrants to the tender which famously asked for ‘some creative ideas’ and it seems that quite a few did exactly that. It quickly got whittled down to a shortlist of six who met our man Boris the Mayor, then four more were booted out (including The Partners who promptly wrote this).

So it was down to two, one of which was Conran (yes, they of restaurants and shops) and the other still remains undisclosed (although rumours suggest that it could be Dragon brands/Dragon Rouge, they of Consignia fame, but that’s unconfirmed). All slightly odd. Conran have even revealed that their idea is based on the principle of an open quote mark. Er, OK, great.

The design tender took place at the same time as one for PR and for the running of a ‘public engagement programme’  (we think that’s code for market research), and the working budget was about half a million (pounds). Several of our sources and one Deep Throat who refuses to be named report that the final presentation of the three pronged strategy and design options went badly.

So badly that the steering group (on sight of their options) collectively asked ‘why are we doing this?’ to the marketing project leader, at which point the flaxen-haired one also asked ‘why are we doing this?’ Not good.

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering if we got feedback from the GLA about our tender, we were told we were too expensive (always a good place to be, happy with that).

We’ve since heard off-the-record feedback that any group involved with any of the previous work for any constituent part was immediately discounted (which swiftly took johnson banks, Saffron, Wolff Olins and Interbrand out of the equation, that’s if they even got involved).

But the man at the GLA was very nice about it.

Our original piece on this is here, since re-blogged by Creative Review here with the obligatory millions of comments.

For some reason, in early 2004 we skipped the whole Christmas card thing and sent everyone a ‘still a good idea’ sale catalogue. A really weird idea, with re-photographed, unused ideas.

We found a copy in a plan chest yesterday. Some of the thoughts are still quite strange. Such as this imagery about polluted cities (starting with London).

Or this idea about making more of local heritage.

Or this thought that the ‘serving suggestion’ often featured on packs could indeed be the brand itself.

Or (in a similar vein) perhaps you could brand everything the size it actually was.

Or this still quite neat idea of an inside-out book. Ideal for Rachel Whiteread, we always thought.

It’s fair to say that most of these ideas are still unused. Funny that.

Another semi-random purchase on ebay, this time ‘10 kilos of mixed type - usable’, plus some rather dinky little type boxes donated very kindly ‘if we picked them up’.

Some of it arrived slightly, er, jumbled. Cue sorting.

But worth a bit of manual labour because we’ve been desperate to get our miniature Adana press (purchased in the summer) up-and-running.

Quite tough hand sorting eight-point metal type. Only for those with tiny fingers.

Here’s a bit of old-school composition.

There’s that messy ink stuff again.

And a bit of hand printing on the press.

We seem to have a few registration issues at the moment. Need to fix that.

And a quick joke for fun.

Marvellous.

Wedding and party invites coming soon, as long as you don't mind the occasional upside down letter and slightly over-generous word spacing.

Thanks to Gen Harrison at Robert Smail's Printing Works 9 High Street, Inerleithen, EH44 6HA for the donated type.

For decades now, from Jimmy Page to Franz Ferdinand, it’s been de rigeur for musicians to train at art school before finding fame in music. But it’s still remarkably rare for anyone to write any actual songs about their experiences in art before crossing over. Presumably all that sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll puts their memories of dodgy Letraset and hand tracing alphabets out of type books into slightly geeky perspective.

We were reminded last week by Coudal Partners that in our spare time we’ve been collecting references to design in rock music. It’s not a very expansive list - rock and roll doesn’t reference design much.

Electric Six (they of the 2003 classic ‘Gay Bar’) last year finally stepped up to the plate with ‘She’s a graphic Designer’. 

You can only marvel at these lyrics:

She’s a nine-to-fiver
Got evil up inside her
She's a - she's a graphic designer

Nobody does it finer
Photoshopping tiger
Simplification messiah

Cropping suicider

And she knows her designs of me are graphic
And she goes into work early to avoid traffic
And she don't need prose and she don't need pride
And she don't need your feedback to know where it's at
And she don't need a resume to get through my door
You better bring your A-game when you wage your war
A designer, designer!

Taking your shit higher
Running something by her
She's a - she's a graphic designer

So now we know - we’re all ‘cropping suiciders’ (and ‘simplification messiahs’). Yeah - right on. You're left wondering of course if they had some sort of run-in with this particular designer - maybe an argument over centred type or a precise shade of light green.

If we broaden our search to art and design, we can all of course cite the Manic Street Preacher’s ‘Designed for Life’, or Pulp’s ‘Common People’ and Jarvis Cocker’s encounter at St Martins….

She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College
That's where I caught her eye
She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola
She said fine and in thirty seconds time she said...

Recently Cocker has admitted that the lines were inspired by a rich girl he met there, but he had ‘embellished’ his memory somewhat - ‘I only knew her for a matter of weeks, and I only spoke to her a few times, but it stuck in my mind what she was saying, that she wanted to sleep with 'common people like me.’

Before that, there’s very little, apart from Donald Fagen’s 1982 classic, New Frontier, where his ambitious white kid emerges from a bomb shelter and pronounces ‘I can't wait till I move to the city, till I finally make up my mind to learn design and study overseas.’

So for a while that seemed to be it. But some recent digging reveals some hope. 

The Cribs song ’Be safe’ tells us of:

Telephone poles like praying mantras against the sky, metal arms outstretched. So much land travelled so little sense made of it. It doesn't mean a thing all this land laid out behind us. I'd like to take off into these woods and get good and lost for a while. I'm disgusted with petty concerns; parking tickets, breakfast specials. Does someone just have to carry this weight? Abstract typography, methane inconvenience, linear gospel, Nashville sales lady, and torturous lice, mad Elizabeth. Chemotherapy bullshit.

And how about this from the puzzlingly named Dananananaykroyd - The Greater than Symbol and Hash:

New letters across chest emblazoned
You're rewarded with high fives and embraces
Seating banks are ripped from the theatres
To build forts and to build defenses
In the streets, millions gather
Ignite documents and get warm from the
Ink of the burning alphabet

As for US based band Times New Viking, we can't see any proof yet that their name is anything other than a great type joke. 

Perhaps we should end with this - an offering from United Nations - Revolutions in Graphic Design that we’re still trying to decipher:

I can hear them in the distance,
Running through the trees waving both guns blind.
You raise the flag for the revolution, "the common man,"
With wit for protection,
Running through the gate to the Palace Walls.
You raise the sign, it's a revolution in graphic design.
We'll trade positions,
Parading through the streets until the roads turn red.

Surprise!!!
We're making revolutions in graphic design.
We're making revolutions in graphic design.
Look at the lines! Look at the colors we use!
White beside the red behind the double bold type.
1,2,3-1,2,3-1,2,3-1,2,3-Hold it up high!!!
Gentlemen, we've made revolutions in graphic design.
Now design solutions for Western Decline!!!
We've manufactured dissent.
No one stops the press, you just keep it in time:
1,2,3-1,2,3-1,2,3-1,2,3-1,2,3...4

If anyone has any more for our list, please email info (at) johnsonbanks (dot) co (dot) uk.

Thanks to Ed Cornish for his extra research 

Most graphic designers learn their trade by studying (at least at first) their favourite designers. Sometimes this results in ideas which are reminiscent to those that have gone before. It happens.

Sometimes design trends lead to uncanny similarities - only recently this new identity was released in India...

...which looks pretty similar to this...

...which itself looks pretty similar to this Brand Union Vodafone project from 2007/8.

And with a few more slides we could link the style back even further. Nice trend though.

Sometimes similarities happy by accident - we once designed this symbol for the UK Presidency of Europe...

...but all hell let loose when a far-right anti-Europe think tank said they had once used swans for their symbol too. Unlucky break.

When we designed these stamps for the Royal Mail several years ago, we were at pains to point out that we had been influenced by all sort of things, from Fuzzy Felt Faces, to that book on Vegetable Faces, to Archimboldo. 

But this was, as far as we knew, the first time that anyone had supplied ten blank fruit and vegetable stamps along with 76 stickers for customising them.

So, perhaps we should view the announcement that the stamps below will be released in Finland next March, with, er, encouragement?

Apparently the Finns say that:  ‘The Funny Vegetables stamp booklet gives you an opportunity for a little hands-on work. You can give the tomato a moustache or put a hat on the asparagus or ears on the cucumber. You can dress up the vegetable stamps designed by Nina Rintala as you wish with the accessories included in the booklet.’  Marvellous thought.

We’re not quite sure what to say about this one. The trend for sticker stamps featuring fruit and vegetables is really taking off though isn't it?

Just a quick note to say that some of our Japanese projects are featured in the recent edition of Eye Magazine, leaning towards the ideas that combine English and Japanese words and images together in one.

It includes projects such as the Sendai Observatory project, our typography for the UK Japan logo and the recent Matsuri Japan work.

The article transcript can be found here. 

Earlier this year, in conjunction with Brand New we created a re-brand of US telecoms giant, Verizon, that just happened to coincide with April the 1st (April fool’s day).

Part of this theoretical project was to re-name Verizon to ‘Very’, and we illustrated the ‘new’ brand with images culled from one of our favourite photography sites, The Sartorialist (which features very cool ‘street’ photography, as at the top of this post).

Now, when Littlewoods direct rebranded as ‘Very’ in the summer we put that down to coincidence. Hey, what’s in a name. Well, a nice name...

But the unveiling of Verizon’s new advertising campaign has got us really confused. One of the 182 commentators on the original spoof asked ‘am I the only one who thinks this could actually have potential? Seriously, verizon, take a hint and do some of this!’.

Well, guess what, they’ve done exactly that and used pictures commissioned from, er, The Sartorialist, for their ads. Ha.

So the spoof re-brand with web-culled imagery recycles itself into a real ad campaign for the same company with the same imagery six months later.

Confused? We are. Flattered? Er, not really sure.

Thanks to Armin for the tip

Last night’s event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Prince Philip Designer’s Prize could have come at a critical moment.
 
This prize has run, on and off, for 50 yrs, is masterminded by The Design Council, and for the vast majority of its history (much like the Council itself) has been known for celebrating product and engineering design. So just a quick tally up reveals that the award has gone to this sector 37 out of 50 times. Last night didn’t divert from the script when it gave the award to the designer and manufacturer of the Brompton folding bicycle.

 
It’s fair to point out that the last 20 years has seen a slight loosening of product and engineering’s grip on the prize – four graphic designers have won, as have two architects and polymaths such as Thomas Heatherwick.

But the prize is known for its 3d emphasis, for awarding those more in the ‘autumn’ of their careers and for its occasionally eccentric results. One year a balloon designer won. Go back in time and the Mini Metro one once. (True). At D&AD in the early noughties there were serious questions asked as to whether nominating anyone was worth it since they were routinely ignored (nominations are taken from various industry bodies, including the likes of the Institution of Engineering Designers and the Chartered Society of Designers).

Last night there was opportunity to pull away from this history and acknowledge some undoubted stars: architect David Adjaye or fashion designers and entrepreneurs such as Wayne Hemingway, Jeff Banks and Hussein Chalayan.

Graphics was represented by 3 nominations, Michael Peters, Peter Saville and Smith & Milton. All were presumably delighted to be included, all left disappointed.

In a way, the 50th anniversary winner fits quaintly with what has become the hard-coded, institutionalised, post-war view of design: ‘Britain can make it’, the Festival of Britain, Routemaster buses, red post boxes, Michael Caine, Mini Coopers, Mary Quant, Spitfire aircraft, Frank Pick and Underground graphics. All great memories, all great designs (some recently recorded on a nice set of stamps) but a view that celebrates past glories, mad inventors in sheds and re-runs of The Great Escape.
 
The critical moment has arrived for this prize: if it’s place is to ‘look back’  and applaud long-standing industry names, then it should stick to its traditions and don’t nominate young hopefuls.
 
Or it could look hard at its past and re-think. If in just three clicks of a mouse you can marvel at the ingenuity of Universal Everything, gawk at Jonathan Ive’s portfolio in California or celebrate a Brit who’s big in Japan, maybe it’s time to start looking forward. Just maybe.

Multiple trips to Japan and constant frustration at being unable to read the language has sparked off an unusual typographic project at johnson banks. Earlier in the year we started seeing if we could combine the English language and Japanese script in some way.

One of the three typographic styles that is used in Japan is essentially phonetic, and is called Katakana. We’ve been attempting to find ways to incorporate phonetic sounds with the Katakana letterforms.

Here’s an example - UNIQLO, in Japanese, is pronounced with four clear syllables, U, Ni, Q, Lo (they’re actually spoken like this, Yoo Nee Koo Roh). There are four katakana used for these sounds.

Looks great, but unless you’ve learned the sounds, you’re no wiser. In our typeface, which we call ‘Phonetikana’, it would look like this.

My name, Michael, is usually pronounced Ma Ee Keh Roo, so here it is in Phonetikana.

Here are some more characters.

We’ve been developing a series of examples to show it in action - at the top of this post is ‘superhero’, below is ‘big apple’.

‘Moo’ and ‘baa’?

Or ‘big in Japan’. (If you say them out loud, as you see them, you’re getting close-ish to Japanese pronunciation).

See if you can work these out.

(That’s ‘top banana’ and ‘tomato’).

We’re also working on some japanese phrases too...

...‘niko niko’ is Japanese for smile...

...and ‘doki doki’ means ‘the sound of my heart beating’.

‘Kuru kuru’ is the ‘sound of something spinning’...

...and guess what the Japanese say when they take a group photo? Yep - ‘cheese’ (or ‘chee-zoo’ if you want the right pronunciation).

This is all work in progress, so apologies to our Japanese readers for any linguistic blunders. If you’re interested in finding out more about Phonetikana, (or just want to correct our grammar) please email info (at) johnsonbanks (dot) co (dot) uk.

There’s also a piece about Phonetikana on the design blog, Designboom, here.

We wouldn’t normally say this but for legal safety’s sake we have to point out that all of the ideas, concepts and designs above are ©johnson banks design limited 2009.

Some slight slips in concentration at johnson banks today since this was just delivered, following a bit of crafty ebay action earlier in the week. It might look small, but needed four people to get it out of the van...

...and seems to involve real, analogue, non-digital, er, you know, ink.

Our first attempt? Hopeless. We’ll need some time.

But here’s a master printer putting her back into it.

Being true designers at heart, we’re just as excited at embossing things ‘blind’ so we won't need any of that nasty ink stuff. Spot the creative use of polyboard.

Anyway, finally we can make use of the long-stored stash of wood type.

We’ll be accepting commissions soon, In the meantime, all types of flowers pressed, speedy 24 hour service with a smile.

Recent college placement Jamie Hearn offered us his thoughts on entering into his final year at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

So, it’s arrived. The week I begin my third year at college. I was going to say go back to college, but as it’s my final year, I am treating it as a ‘new beginning’. Not just because that sounds incredibly upbeat and optimistic however. Over the summer the feeling of ‘this is it’ has very much sunk in. What do I want from my final year? That’s the main question I’ve been asking myself over the summer. What would I really like to do with my time? What things would I regret not having done? I don’t want the dreaded ‘why didn’t I…’ popping into my head 12 months from now.
 
I have often thought of my BA Graphic Design course as a marathon. At times it has very much felt like one. Foundation was a quick sprint by comparison. Like any marathon, there are great moments, mixed with painful unpleasant ones. When you get the momentum you have to keep it. At times you have to grit your teeth and endure. It is an intense experience of ups and downs, with lots to learn both personally and professionally.
 
College can be my best friend in the whole world. Sometimes it drives me mad and I hate it with a passion. However on the whole it is a healthy relationship. The frustrating comes from being in such a competitive, challenging environment. If is difficult when you are constantly being taken out of your comfort zone. However, this process is rewarding, and you improve quickly.
 
At present there are numerous conversations about the role of design, in relation to our society in our current climate. As a student, it is an opportunity to think about the ways we can improve our world and make positive contributions. At college, complete creative freedom is given to you. The best students use this wisely and responsibly, in order to achieve great results. Tutors are tough on you. Listen to what they say, and you stand to benefit. They indicate it is a tough journey ahead to be successful in the creative industries. Obstacles are put in your way, a bit of bureaucracy here and there. All of this is frustrating but an important learning curve. 
 
I remember one tutor telling me ‘the world does not need another graphic designer’. A daunting statement, just one term into my course. It made me ask various questions of myself ‘how am I going to make a difference?’ ‘What is my message?’ ‘And what is the best way to communicate it?’ By asking these questions, you begin to develop the professional focused approach needed to be successful.
 
The alternative approach for students? The naïve one? Around a year ago, I found myself in a bizarre conversation with a group of engineering students, on a visit to see my best friend at a large, well-respected university up north. Two individuals I talked to were convinced the world owed them a living. Apparently a lecturer had made a tongue-in-cheek comment, saying on their graduation a ‘60k job with a Ferrari thrown-in was waiting for them’. They had taken his ‘joke’ somewhat literately. One of them laughed when I said I was studying Graphic Design, and told me my career working in McDonald’s would not be far away.
 
Subsequently, the two boys failed their first year of Engineering. They haven’t gone back to university. They didn’t get enough marks to do so, I’m told. I hear they haven’t got that 60k job, or the Ferrari. Apparently one of them now works in…
 
So I am keeping a cool eye on my future in the coming year. Most importantly, I will continue to be passionate about the work I do. If so, work quickly turns to play, and great enjoyment is gained. Enjoyment is a key ingredient to successful study, and what I will aim to achieve most. If I can say 12 months from now I enjoyed the work I did in my final year of college, I will be a very happy graduate.
 
Jamie Hearn is (now) a third year BA Graphic Design student: his website is here.

Editor’s note: we posted the wrong version of this yesterday. This is the right one. Sorry.

Over the last few days, a new campaign we’ve been developing for Save the Children has launched.

Every One is a global initiative that’s being run in each of the 28 different Save the Childrens around the world, so a truly global campaign. The aim of the campaign is to make the world finally wake up to the plight of the world’s under-fives in under-developed countries (many millions are still dying every year from preventable diseases).

In the UK, the campaign is being driven by an advertising campaign we’ve developed which is running now on trains, outdoor media and press. The campaign is written in the past tense, about the hopes and dreams of children no longer here.

Internationally, each country is running its own campaigns, but we’ve been developing a suite of translated logos for certain languages (a few of these are shown below).

That’s Bengali, Spanish, French, Arabic and Hindi for all the keen linguists out there.

And running through the whole campaign there are three weights of a new ‘woodblock’ version of Gill Sans that we’ve designed (following on from the versions of Gill Sans drawn by children for a previous Save the Children initiative).

There’s more information here on the project, and how you can get involved.

Thanks to our collaborators on this project, Howard Fletcher and Monotype.

The blur of last week’s London Design Festival meant a few things got a bit lost along the way.

Like this: Rooted - an experimental show created by graduates that allowed art and design students free space to showcase their own work.

‘There are no rules or boundaries; people can put up, hang, project (or even wear) their work wherever they want for it to be seen and stand out from the rest! It is completely free to put up work, it is simply about getting your work up and out there’ say the Rooting team of Owen Evans, Ella Collinge, Peter Stadden and Zoe Barrett. (Sorry that sounded slightly rude, you know what we mean).

They had one ‘Rooted’ in April of this year, then Rooted 2 was held last week at the Truman Brewery, with over 50 exhibitors and hundreds of guests, and a 12-person guest judging panel with the likes of NB:Studio, VCCP (of compare-the-meerkat-dot-com fame) and Wunderman.

You can find out more here, and there are plans for another Rooted later in the year.

This is technically a post to say that our notebooks from the V&A fete are now on sale through a site called Supermarket Sarah. But actually it’s much more interesting to point out that there’s some really great stuff on her site (and her stall at Portobello market).

How about this Duck Origami Hat.

Or these Indian notebooks (as a set of five).

Or this one-off tank top. Groovy.

Sarah decided to leave the corporate world behind her (she used to work at Poke) and has set up shop in her own home. Her home, round the corner from Portobello Market where she has a stall, is now ‘overflowing with treasures and delights’ and, apparently, ‘she welcomes visitors with tea and cakes’. Crikey.

Oh yes, here’s the bit about our notebooks.

A few weeks ago a client sent me an unusual new business approach he’d received. In an odd twist on the traditional approach, a company has been set up called ‘Bob!’ that markets itself as the ‘Easyjet of design’, advertises its low day rates (just £340 a day) and says it is backed by another design company, Glazer design.

Some of this is quite odd - firstly the budget day rates, secondly the ‘diffusion line’ approach to its product and its backer. What’s to stop someone going to ‘Bob-Glazer’ and not going to the presumably more expensive Glazer itself? (After all they’re both based in the same building, and all the projects advertised at Bob! are in fact old Glazer projects).

Then there’s a further twist: the name ‘Bob’ is already in use by another design company, set up 7 years ago by several Kingston graduates (with the surnames Burgess, O’Connor and Burkhardt, hence the BOB acronym).

Now, when companies choose slightly generic names for their company, (and none of the founders are actually called ‘Bob’) then you can run the risk of confusion. But in the eyes of the law, it’s pretty simple – if a reputation of a company has been built in the public domain, use of that name by another can be seen as ‘passing off’.

So when MARK studio, based in Manchester (they of several nice projects over the last few years)…

…discovered that another ‘Studio Mark’  had been set up they had to go through a lengthy but ultimately successful legal process to get them to desist.

That’s what the original ‘Bob’ face with the new ‘Bob!’ Even though the original Bob has done some notable projects (such as the Bill Amberg animals at the top of this post), set up the offshoot Bob Books (in 2006) and has had its fair share of attention in the design press, it will still have to invest time, money and legal fees to deter their rival.

Imagine if someone set up and ‘stole’ your name, and refused to give it up. That’s how this feels when it happens.

But ‘new Bob’ have made a fatal error. 3 years ago, ‘old Bob’ and SAS collaborated on a Land Securities annual report which was well received and eventually shortlisted at the 2007 Design Week awards.

Guess who ‘new Bob’ have been emailing about their new company and service? You guessed it. Land Securities. If that isn’t a clear case of passing off, then the law’s an ass.

The posters have arrived and are going up.

Strings have been changed.

The pedals are checked.

The amp’s on 11.

Last reminder: the Guitar and Graphics extravaganza has its last gig of the tour tomorrow lunchtime at the V&A.

Opening today, as part of this week’s London Design Festival, is an exhibition organised by Grafik magazine, with collaborators SEA Design, GF Smith and Team Impression.

They asked thirty-nine UK based graphic designers to create a poster interpreting an Olympic sport or discipline.

Johnson banks were given the Triathlon.

After some thought we plumped for redesigning an athlete’s foot (or Triathlete’s foot, we should say).

We went for stronger, better spaced and slightly webbed toes for the 1.5km swim, a heel converted to a spare cog for the 40km cyling stage, and treads incorporated into the sole for better grip during the 10km run.

We’ve persuaded Grafik to let us show a sneak preview of some of the others below (apologies but we can’t show all 39).

Studio Frith were given Free Wresting.

Cartlidge Levene: Sailing

Non-Format: Track Cycling

North: Rowing

Sea: Diving

Angus Hyland: Artistic Gymnastics

Noah Harris: Athletics.

The exhibition is only on for short period (until the 24th), but the posters and a catalogue are for sale with profits going to sport-related charities. More info here.

When the Japan Society asked us to design the symbol for the autumn festival at Spitalfields market, we hadn’t realised just how huge an event it would turn out to be.

Apparently 35,000 visitors came to watch the myriad events on Saturday. That’s pretty impressive.

The logo takes the Kanji for ‘Matsuri’ (which is Japanese for festival)...

...and fuses it with an ‘A’ and a ‘J’ to form part of the logo. We wanted to find a way to symbolise the Japanese and Western traditions coming together, and this seemed a perfect way.

It’s been designed so it will work equally well horizontally or vertically.

Here are some applications we spotted on the day. And (of course) a bento box.

A couple of nights ago we were at the 10th anniversary party of CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment). We’ve been working on several projects timed around the anniversary, one of which is a ten year review of the organisation’s work.

Here are some of our favourite spreads.

It’s fair to say that the real star turn of the evening (apart from the review, obviously) was artist Dr Michael Pinsky, who had suggested that those who had RSVP’d to the event take part in a large scale art piece. This seemed to involve people arranging bits of an aerial view...

..then having to piece it all together, whilst clutching warm chardonnay, all the while trying to not knock anything off the walls of the Saatchi Gallery. Very entertaining.

There’s a great gag in this to do with ‘how many architects does it take to finish a jigsaw’ but they’re a good client. Maybe we shouldn’t go there.

Happy birthday CABE.

There’s a scalable interactive version of the art piece here. There’s another of our recent projects for CABE here.