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.

A few years back we took a car full of stuff to the local skip, and marvelled at the collection of old-tech kit collected there. But then we looked a bit harder - what was that lurking in the corner?

Reversing the accepted rules of engagement with the dump (ie we took stuff away, not left it) we scampered off with a 1986/87 era Macintosh SE. With one megabyte of RAM!

Just recently we had a spare moment to indulge in a bit of Ebay action to source one of those weird green putty-coloured keyboards, and that lovely old square mouse.

And since then, we’ve been cooing away in front of our new toy...

...which is especially good at jaggedy Avant Garde headlines. Classy.

It’s an odd trip down memory lane seeing these control panels again.

And we’ve managed to work out that it was last used in 1996.

Trouble is, we’re not entirely sure what to do with it now. Maybe find an old copy of Coreldraw, or Pagemaker and load it up? Trouble is, we’d need them on floppy disks. Tricky.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a stone for the last few weeks, you’ll have struggled to ignore the fact that Our Great City of London (or the Greater London Authority and its Mayor, to be precise) have decided the time is ripe for a re-brand. It’s been holding a highly controversial public tender - with the Olympics looming, it seems there’s a desire for a unified visual approach for the city.

The whole ‘brand’ for London issue was probably kicked off by the various ‘ON’ variants introduced by previous Mayor Ken Livingston. Which was then confused further by Visit London’s own variant on the theme (they’re the tourist ‘bit’, in case you’re wondering).

In the early noughties there was meant to be an overarching ‘brand idea’ (courtesy of Interbrand) which became known as ‘London Unlimited’ and involved some fairly standard stock shots and slightly dodgy kaleidoscope graphics that no-one wanted to use. So no-one did.

In the meantime, Film London was done, Visit London was done by Wolff Olins...

…and johnson banks and Circus did the inward investment arm which was re-named Think London.

Put all the elements together, and yes they were disparate. And a bit confusing. So another attempt was made in 2006/7, this time by Wolff Olins, to bring the ‘essence’ of London together, and a thought based on ‘London: Planet City’ was presented, but never adopted.

In the meantime, Visit London (courtesy of Saffron) adopted some nicely centred Akzidenz (as you do), and apparently tried and failed to persuade the other players to adopt the same livery. Maybe they were asking ‘why Akzidenz?’, who knows.

Step back from London (and typography) for a minute and you can understand why one of the world’s greatest cities would want a coherent, strong, central brand. After all, look what Amsterdam did – they removed 55 separate department logos and replaced it all with the three crosses of the city flag.

Very nicely done. A round of applause for our orange friends, and their designers, Thonik. (Although it was almost immediately confused by this I Amsterdam work, but that’s besides the point).

Just as ‘I love New York’ will continually complicate any attempt by New York to rebrand (ie there’s a famous symbol there that isn’t going away), any attempt by ‘London’ to change its spots faces an immovable, immutable object with a century old back-story – the London Transport Roundel. No-one with any brains is going to change that. It sums up ‘Transport in London’, yes, but it currently sums up ‘London’ as well.

Add to that the furore concerning the London Olympic logo, and any attempt to draw those nice, neat, clean up slides that brand consultants like to do is immediately buggered.

You can propose all manner of smart symbolic devices to draw together parts of the equation, but some significant parts aren’t going to re-brand. Cue messy diagram.

Anyway, back to the pitch. The bit that’s got everyone talking is that the GLA, in their own sweet way wanted people to wade through a massive tender questionnaire, write some pithy words on the issues, and oh, yes, chuck a few scribbles in while you’re at it.

The legal, ISO-thirty-three-thousand-and-thirty-one tender stuff in current UK tenders is tricky enough. Add in the ‘how multi-racial is your workforce’ questions, then the  ‘please tell us the sexual preferences of your designers’ stuff and tempers start to fray and evenings lengthen. But apart from assessing exactly what sexual habits have to do with logo-design, anyone left with an ounce of self-esteem is left with a very ethical conundrum – ‘yes I want to have a shot at London’s logo, but do I really want to be giving ideas away for free?’

At johnson banks, our route through these tricky waters was to write the obligatory pithy document, but rather than show any designs per se, we showed a few brief diagrams then concluded that actually, perhaps they should consider this?

(Yes, of course, we’re being biased, but we’re always being told it would make a great logo for the city so we thought we’d propose it).

Unsurprisingly this, er, single-minded approach has gone down like a proverbial lead balloon, and no we haven’t been asked to go any further. No surprise there then. Several notable figures such as Martin Lambie-Nairn have already denounced the whole thing, and many people have rightly queried whether chucking a few hasty scribbles in a document is really the right way to go about this, or indeed even remotely professional.

One brave/reckless/misguided/inspired (choose your own adjective) approach came from Moving Brands who set up a public website for this public tender. They’ve also been shown the door, which, considering the amount of work they did, was probably quite gutting.

The issue here isn’t so much who will be selected (the pain of the process means only the larger groups have the firepower to get through the tender requirements), the issue is what will be chosen. We know that the London Olympic bid logo free pitch was a fatally flawed process: remember, from 1100 applicants that included this…  

…they could only choose this.

The ‘real’ 2012 involved proper presentations from proper companies, but there seems to be a feeling at the GLA that someone somewhere got bounced into the final Olympics logo, and the hoo-hah that came with its launch was perhaps undesirable.There’s a view that this time around, real Londoners should be involved, or at least have a say.

How the ‘public engagement’ part of this project will manifest itself is yet to be seen. Any attempt at further ‘free’ or ‘public’ designs will only result in more mockery and/or accusations of crowd-sourcing on the grandest of scales. Only the briefest of skims through the entries so far to Moving Brands self-initiated competition reveals just how scary design can get when placed in the hands of the public.

What can we conclude from this? That buying big design projects in this country continues to be completely inept? Maybe. That the chances of London getting a decent logo are pretty slim? Perhaps. That London already has its unofficial logo, and that’s the famous roundel? Probably.

Maybe we’ll get a logo straight out of ‘brushstroke central’, the universally accepted design approach for tourist brands.

But here’s the best bit. When is the logo needed for?

The first of November.

So that’s 7 weeks to consult, engage the public, design and implement a highly controversial brand that will have to co-exist with the TfL roundel and the Olympic mark, whilst gluing together all the other, disparate organisations? Oh, London, what have you done…

Some pics from yesterday’s Guitars and Graphics talk.

Hummer not ours, honest.

Crowd? A bit quiet. Stage-diving? None. Sainsbury’s bag on stage? Not cool.

Reaction: ‘The bollocks’ said D&AD. ‘7 out of 5’, said some delegates (shouldn’t that be 11 out of 10 to be a bit more Spinal Tap?).

Johnson: ‘I fluffed too many bits. I’m rusty. I need to work on my tone. I’ve got a lot of work to do for the 24th’.

A few eagle eyed readers have been in touch checking on the dates of the Guitars and Graphics talks. We can confirm that the dates are correct (phew no need to re-print the t-shirts then).

So that’s today at the D&AD Xchange conference, and lunchtime on the 24th at the V&A, more information on the (amended) website here.

The V&A talk is free, please call +44 (0)20 7942 2211. Tickets available from Sackler Centre reception on the day.

It’s over a year since Interesting 2008, at which johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson delivered a chaotic 20 minute speech on the crossover between Guitars and Graphics in the 20th century.

The 2009 expanded remix is now ready for its autumn tour (hence the t-shirt) - next week at D&AD XChange (the annual conference for design educators) and at the end of September at the V&A as part of its London Design Festival week.

The lecture involves the traditional keynote slides and general banter whilst Johnson plays various acoustic and electric guitars, cues Quicktime and stamps on a vast pedalboard. Could all go horribly wrong.

All tours these days need merchandise, so here's the poster and more t-shirting.

The XChange conference is a pre-booked 2 day thing, more information here. The V&A talk is a free lunchtime talk (1-2pm) on the 24th, in the Sackler Centre, with tickets available on the day. More info here.

We’re still catching up on the summer backlog - here are some of the recent entries to our ‘Time’ project.

Kimberley Chan sent these great buttons. She told us that ‘My mum buys me a badge every year for my birthday and I've collected  them all in a wooden box which I've had since the first badge.’ Bless. 

Meanwhile Chris Bassett says ‘My submission is a poster displaying some information of the date and time of my birth. I have also written a small piece on the importance of time, and making the most of it while we have it.’

Kerrie O'Neill  has sent us this rather poignant piece, called ‘modern love story’.

And just the other day Chris Bassett sent us more: a photographic piece that ‘represents the passing of time through the photography of several pairs of converse, with the newest pair positioned in the foreground.’

This project stems from a section on our main site dedicated to people’s responses to an open brief of Time. Feel free to send us your ideas (info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk), the best ones are posted here on Thought for the week.

One of the many things in our inbox after the break was this tragic tale from Scot McNaughton.

‘Yesterday, in the dead of night... my ‘You Are Here’ poster fell from the wall, the heavy glassed frame crashing to the floor waking everyone, tearing the poster in the process. I was hoping you may still have one to replace my pride and joy....’

Here’s the proof: a ripped poster, the glum designer, the smashed glass, the empty wall. Too sad.

But will the johnson banks shop have the heart to replace it for him? We await the decision.

Hello there. Thought for the week returns from its summer break and look, one of our projects has been outed by Design Week when we weren’t looking.

Yes, we have started work on a re-brand of Ravensbourne College, which for decades has resided in sleepy Chislehurst and is next year moving to this state-of-the-art hive of activity in Greenwich designed by Foreign Office Architects. That’s quite a change.

We’re working with them on their brand and a new visual identity, and trying to work out what to do with the extraordinary pattern that will cloak the entire building, based on the famous tiling tessellations of maths boffin Roger Penrose.

The Penrose tessellation that will cover the Ravensbourne building is based on just three shapes, but out of those shapes come the most extraordinary combinations and patterns.

Below is a mock-up of the window detailing, and a corner piece noticed on a recent site visit.

The new building sits right next to The Dome/02: here’s what the view from the top of the building will be like (minus the iron railing, of course).

We’re anticipating that the Identity project will launch early in the new year. If you’re interested in more detail, there’s a good piece here in building design magazine.

In our spare time, most of the studio seems to collect bizarre pictures of signage. It’s a geek-designer thing.

In an end-of-term, holiday frame of mind, here’s some recent highlights, starting with the groyne injury above, spotted in Brighton.

How about this multi-function shopfront in Brooklyn with directions written in?

Also spotted in Brooklyn (weirdly), a rather neat bit of graffiti on an ATM, and some, er bread type.

Closer to home, regular train journeys reveal some classics: how about this for an odd bit of copywriting. (It may not be immediately funny).

Or this dog sign with some mad, ‘poster within a poster’ thing going on.

Only yesterday, we noticed these poor pieces of spelling on a building site, with a consistent, nagging bit of mark-up in green marker pen.

Meanwhile, a certain design college should be ashamed of this.

A couple more random sightings in South London.

And a classic to end.

The johnson banks thought for the week is taking a short summer break. We’ll be back later in August.

Obviously we hope that all the interns that pass through johnson banks have a wonderful time. (Obviously).

But eventually the time comes when they have to leave and get on with their dissertations, or go home to Sheffield, or both. Sometimes they even give us leaving presents.

Last week Owen and James came to end of their time and surprised us all with these customised sweets. Not only johnson banks jelly babies, but dedicated deliciousness for most of the studio as well.

Two designers on a budget needing a cheap way to say thank you? Very neat.

Shoulder pads were trendy, once. So were leg warmers. For decades they’ve been an absolute fashion no-go. But what’s almost certain is that they will be back. (In fact it’s pretty certain that some ‘edgy’ fashion student is sketching something that looked like it dropped off the set of Dynasty as we speak).

In music we’ve had nearly two decades of guitar driven grunge/indie rock, even a revival of metal. So it’s no surprise that the newest bands have turned their dials back to eighties synthesisers for something that sounds different.

20 years ago I joined a design company who had just done three huge corporate schemes with the same colour scheme – yellow and grey. It seems ridiculous now (it seemed faintly ridiculous then) but the odds are that within a decade those colours will be an acceptable combination again. Not long afterwards I was wedded to an eighties English trend for beautifully letter-spaced capitals, but only a few weeks ago presented a scheme based on lightly leaded, tightly tracked caps. I think we used to call it ‘close not touching’ (as in the instructions to the typesetter on how to set the letters). It’s been a while.

Many graphic designers will try to somehow ‘insure’ their work against the vagaries of fashion and the wavering of art directors such as me. But the truth is that certain graphic approaches, especially those deemed shocking and revolutionary, will always have a brief and fabulous burst in the limelight. Then 3 years later they seem normal. 3 years after that, overly familiar, then finally, they fall hopelessly out of fashion. David Carson’s work began the nineties at the cutting edges of layout design and ended it in ads for Coca Cola – an agency art director had selected a ‘look’ from what was out there and put it to temporary use to make a brand look groovier just as Carson’s signature style began to wane. And it in many respects it was inevitable.

You can study this most easily by flicking through design books and journals from 10 years ago. Often the approaches look pretty tired. Do the same for twenty years ago - things usually look awful. Oddly though, look at something from thirty years ago (like the U&LC layouts below) and layouts can start to look a little more interesting. They look terrible, sometimes, but somehow plausible, all at the same time.

Don’t believe me? Give it a try. The default typography of the mid to late seventies: Lubalin-esque typestyles, ITC fonts and, of course, American Typewriter. The hippest typefaces of the last few years, having lain dormant in between: our typewriter-based friend, and several of Lubalin’s faces such as Avant Garde and Lubalin Graph (see image at the top of this post).

Wolff Olins developed VAG Rounded for the Volkswagen/Audi Group (hence the name) decades ago, but no-one touched rounded typefaces until (paradoxically) a swathe of music graphics, club flyers and eventually their own Tate scheme caught the wind of a revival of rounded letterforms at the turn of the century. When Jonathan Hoefler recently released a rounded version of his noughties classic, Gotham, it seemed entirely logical.

Blocky, shadowed lettering? It’s coming back. Look at this gem from a Graphis magazine of the late seventies.

The last time counterless or deco inspired geometric typefaces were in? At least thirty years ago. Dig out some Mervyn Kurlansky layouts from the seventies and they look pretty up to date. This Ikko Tananka piece for Hanae Mori looks completely up to date (although it’s from 1972).

Seventies designers were themselves revivalists of deco-style typefaces like Cassandre’s Bifur, and look, there it is again in the recent ‘fashion’ issue of Wallpaper magazine. Could be the 30s, or the 70s. Oh no, it's the noughties...

This may of course suggest that, for anyone creating something ‘cutting edge’ and ‘new’ it may well be best to start looking at stuff which is thirty to forty years ‘old’, then plunder at will. Just look how strong this Nagai layout looks, 37 years later.

This seemingly endless cycle poses a few issues for anyone trying to create anything that lasts any amount of time. Trying to pick, choose or draw a font for a ‘corporate’ is fraught with hurdles - you can gamble and pick a typeface on the rise but if it was a false dawn your client is left trying to produce designs with an absolute turkey and muttering sotto voce about ‘restrictive and out-of-date guidelines’ (this is assuming that you’re trying to find something that will last at least five years or more).

You can play safe and pick an acceptably classic neutral, a typeface that has proved its mettle, like Akzidenz. Or the ‘Almond white’ of the typographers palette, Baskerville. You could gamble a little and bring back an old favourite (such as the recent revival of Plantin). Conversely you could suggest whichever font is currently in vogue, but this has its own drawbacks – when Rotis arrived fully formed at the turn of the nineties it was enthusiastically adopted in the boardrooms of the world, until they realised they’d all adopted the same face, at the same time. There’s a great story that the British Design Council asked 3 firms to advise them on a new house style in the nineties and each one suggested Meta (the ultimate 90s typeface).

Perhaps you could limit yourself entirely to Helvetica, as whole generations of firstly Swiss, then American, now British designers have done. Or ‘do a Vignelli’ (see above) and choose from only Univers, Futura, Century, Bodoni (and of course Helvetica). But these can feel pretty limiting sometimes, especially to younger designers. They may have heard adages about the ‘most neutral typefaces being the most useful’ but in inexperienced hands the classics can feel dull, not delightful. I once spent an unhappy 2 months at an Australian design firm whose principal was then perhaps a little too influenced by ‘Massimo’s motto for font finding’ and insisted that everything be done only in Univers Condensed or Century Schoolbook - at first, incomprehensible, then a challenge, but quickly a chore. I complained. I went off-piste. I got fired.

Certainly drawing a bespoke font can work well – they can take a while for people to adjust to but they can project a unique ‘voice’ that can be very powerful, and by definition hard to adopt and copy by others. Again, it has its risks – when johnson banks and The Foundry developed a rounded version of Renner/Futura for More Th>n at the beginning of the decade, we didn’t know how it would date, and we had the obligatory arguments with agencies who felt it ‘wasn’t right for their layout/ad/direct mail/door drop/whatever’. But now it’s accepted as ‘property of More Th>n’. It’s bedded in. None of the agencies even bother to protest any more.

For years, the only people that could afford the cost of a unique font were the big corporates. Ironically many British corporations over the last decade seem to have shot themselves in the foot by simply copying one another. BT, British Gas, Yell.Com and others have all adopted their own versions of the humanist sans-serif approach that Meta offered up in spades, but all within a few years of each other. So any perceived cut-through is completely lost. (The only people that benefit are those who drew the typefaces). Having spent definitely tens and possibly hundreds of thousands on their own fonts to look different and stand out, they all end up looking the same.

But, are there any rules we can glean from the fine art of picking or creating a font, or looking backwards to go forwards?

My first simple rule is this: any revival will take at least a generation, if not more (ie over 18 years). For the first ten years, everyone can remember what came before, and will react accordingly. St Martins graduates from the noughties hate the idea of doing any deconstructed, layered work (like the college’s nineties alumni) because they feel they would be repeating themselves.

The second rule? After a significant amount of time has past (at least two decades, probably three), all bets are off and anything is fair game. One generation’s pet hate can be just as easily adopted by the next, who aren’t carrying any emotional baggage.

The third rule: examine your own prejudices. My earliest and most embarrassing teenage type layouts involved the likes of Eurostile and American Typewriter, but does that really make them terrible typefaces? (I just replay crumbling letraset sheets and school-disco-poster-horrors through my mind. Eurgh). New graduates never had to re-create headlines by photocopying old ITC catalogues, and might look at them more kindly, with fresh eyes. (I personally vowed decades ago that I’d never use an ITC cut of anything or anyone ever again. I’m sure that will eventually change).

Fourth rule? There are certain fonts that are beyond revival. Souvenir, for example.

The fifth? Someone is proving me wrong, even as I type.

This is an adaptation of a recent article for the ISTD’s magazine, by Michael Johnson

Last weekend at the V&A fete we had a stall selling our handmade, recycled ‘Designer Notebooks’.

The blank covers of the books were made from old cardboard boxes and could be individually customised at the stall with a variety of rubber stamped messages.

The insides were made from a couple of years worth of old design print-outs and random waste paper.

Here are some pictures from the event.

They went like hot cakes, we ran out completely before closing on Saturday and reckon we sold about 600 notebooks in total.

We plan to keep making these in the future and may even sell them from our website. Watch this space for more news.

Don’t forget this weekend it's the tenth V&A village fete.

It’s in the garden at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, costs £3 to get in (50p for kids) and is open tomorrow (Friday) night from 6.30pm to 10pm, and again on Saturday 25th July from 1pm until 5pm.

Tickets will go on sale half an hour before opening and places are limited so to avoid disappointment get there early.

This year it’s a Jubilee celebration with a Blitz spirit, credit-crunch, make do and mend theme. We’ve saved a couple of years worth of colour print-outs, cardboard boxes and general waste paper to create hundreds of unique, handmade, recycled notebooks.

Our ‘Designer Notebooks’ have plain cardboard covers…

…and inside you get to see random bits of our old work, faxes, sketches or whatever, with blank facing pages for your own scribbles.

We’ve also created a set of 12 rubber stamps with specially designed messages…

…so that people can customise their notebooks at the stall.

Come and buy one. They’re cheap and any profit made will be split between two of our charity clients, Christian Aid and Save the Children.

See you there!

We’ll be back with pictures from the fete next week.

Thanks again to Justin at Fenner Paper for all his advice and help.

Thousands of pieces of polyboard have been carefully trimmed, run-outs have been run (and re-run). Plastic sleeves have been bought, by the thousand. Scalpel blades have snapped and shattered, panics have been had, plasters have been found. It is, of course, degree show season and tens of thousands of arts, design and media students have just gone through the stresses and strains of preparing for their spell in the spotlight.

Sticking one’s best pieces of work on a wall and inviting all-comers to come, see (and crit) is a time-honoured ritual. For decades, if an employer wanted to ‘see what was out there’, the only real way to do that was to clear a week of their June diary and tour the shows, scouring for that key addition to the team or influx of raw creativity, either to slot in as an assistant or to put a creative rocket under slightly-too-settled senior designers.

But the ‘old way’ has been under pressure from all sides with the advent of multi-college shows like D&AD’s New Blood (in the UK), the rise of the digital degree show, or on-line portfolios of students’ work. Bit by bit the whole idea of an analogue show at all is being called into question.

Add in the seemingly insatiable growth of courses across all aspects of communications, all frantically direct mailing all the same creative directors across town, and you begin to see how potential employers can become confused and jaded, in equal measure.

There’s no doubt that a carefully curated wall or space at an exhibition can make a huge impact (like Glasgow student Elanor Stewart’s books at the top of this post did on me). And now that the world’s visual bookmarking sites image-crawl constantly for the new and notable, a stand out student project can become an internet meme in a matter of hours. For example, Falmouth student Alan Clarke’s set of Olympic posters got the cyber-Hoffman-Brockmanns all bookmarking furiously in double quick time. It satisfied all the requirements – it was quasi-modernist, looked great 400 pixels across and needed no explanation. (Is that the current definition of ‘great design’, we wonder?).

Students at the recent RCA show had the benefits of a world class gallery space in London to show their wares, and some careers could have been kick-started accordingly, as magazines such as Creative Review have gradually featured theirs and other student shows on their blogs. It’s interesting, cheap content, after all, no-one complains about the publicity and copyright clearance is no huge hurdle – what student could possibly turn down the PR?

But those Olympic posters were picked up via an online degree show site, not via a personal visit to Falmouth itself (that’s a long way to go to check some polyboard,). Other colleges like Brighton have continued to show their work digitally as well as physically and were joined online this year by an interesting presentation by Ravensbourne students. As more and more graduates present their work online, the pressure to present digitally will grow – private views have long been more of an excuse for alumni to return ‘home’, check peer group progress and drink the free beer (whilst agreeing with tutors that ‘their year was actually the best year’) than for any actual genuine talent spotting.

The digital degree shows present a different spin on a traditional conundrum - how to sift the wheat from the chaff? In a ‘real’ show you can make an instant assessment, in theory. Interesting work on wall = quick look at folio. Good folio = ferret about for sketchbooks or other stuff. Still enthused = leaving of card or sending of email.

But in a physical, ‘greatest hits’ type of show like D&AD’s New Blood, there isn’t space to show everyone’s work, whereas online each of 50 students can have a scrolling page all to themselves. Try clicking through dozens of pages of a degree show site and you’ll soon realise that 4 images each is a very arbitrary way to come even close to making a judgement about a designer. After 50 clicks you’re glazing over. After 100 you’ll never want to see any graphic design ever again.

The emphasis in the future may be towards curated digital shows, in the way that colleges have sneakily done for years. It’s no accident that the best students will often get prime position near entrances and exits, where the light is good and you’re well away from the bar. The selection gets even more savage when you get to the shows like New Blood, when over 130 colleges vie for the attention of thousands of visitors and each tries something a little different, trying to stand out in the semi trade-show environment of units, cubicles and ever present lounging students. The brave ones put sofas on their stalls and let the students lounge in public, but that’s always a recipe for disaster.

Here were a couple of bravely different approaches this year - Kingston’s product designers coated their stand in recycled wood, whilst Ravensbourne used huge graphics and tiny screens.

You can distil your best 70 students down to a dozen images, and risk the wrath of the 58 ignored and disenfranchised ones. Or give each student half a square metre of space and collectively merge into mediocrity. Perhaps you could create an environment all of your own and genuinely try to ‘own’ the space. The only guarantee? The final show is going to annoy someone, and visitors to ‘greatest hits’ shows can only really benchmark the level of a college as a whole – finding or selecting one single student from the thousands on offer is virtually impossible.

Perhaps we should turn back to the old way of doing it. Put a line through that week in the diary, go to the shows, enjoy it. But when you get there, find the course tutor and get a list of the 8 best students and er, ignore the rest (sorry). Do that for three days and you’ll get a result. It’s guaranteed.

This is an adaptation of recent article for Creative Review by Michael Johnson

At the end of next week, it’s this year’s V&A village fete. In previous years we’ve produced some variable stuff for our stall, from letter-shaped postcards to ‘air-mail’ airmail.

We’re deep in production of this year’s product. We’re giving the ‘post office’ idea a year off, and opening a stationery store that will hopefully tie-in with this year’s overall fete theme of Jubilee, credit-crunch, austerity living (or something like that).

We’ll reveal in more detail next week, but the idea stemmed from a side project we began last year where we started collecting all the spare run-outs on projects. We documented this for a while until it got too out of hand, but this is how it began.

Having sorted and sifted all the usable paper (there’s a lot of it) we then roped in a friendly paper merchant* with a good guillotine...

...and now it’s all hands on deck making the final product. 

We’ll show you the final stuff next week.

* Our friends at Fenner Paper

This week sees the launch of a major new initiative by one of our long-standing clients, Christian Aid.

They’ve decided to focus their energies around one key message, to eradicate poverty. We’ve been working with their new above the line agency, BMB, on a revised graphic style for the organisation under the rallying flag of ‘Poverty Over’.

The new style features a new masthead/logotype which will be ever-present on Christian Aid’s forthcoming communications, and forms the centrepiece of an advertising campaign launching this week. It’s designed to work in multiple formats...

...and features prominently in these examples for their forthcoming ‘Harvest’ campaign.

The other main design change for the organisation is the introduction of the colour orange into their palette, to give them a more recognisable livery in the UK charity sector.

We’ve been working for a couple of years on a project that will transform the centre of the Welsh capital, Cardiff. Right in the middle of the city, Land Securities and CSC have been transforming the old St David’s centre, and we’ve been working on an unusual new visual identity for the scheme.

The overall identity is based on the thought that hundreds of thousands of people will gather and use the new centre as their meeting-place, and our ‘people’ diagrams swiftly became the beginnings of the entire scheme.

The people, simplified down to dots, become the linking element in a scheme that applies across a vast array of items, from fonts to symbols and images.

Here are some more of the planned applications.

We’ve been collaborating with the project architects Benoy and signage consultants Air design on the three dimensional aspects of the scheme, some of which are shown below.

The project itself opens in the Autumn.

When we reviewed Kingston University’s graduate show a few weeks back we promised to show the video of this short film for HP by Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson.

Here it is, fresh from some pencil-winning exploits at the D&AD student awards. Starts slow but gathers pace, hang in there.

HP - invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

A colleague send us this link to this story about Russian energy giant Gazprom’s latest venture in Nigeria. 

We’re continually creating names ourselves for projects, and one of the great paranoia’s is that that the name that you’ve dreamed up, and the client loves, falls over ‘in legal’ or translation because it means something ridiculous in another language. The classic of course is the Vauxhall Nova, which didn’t really work in Spain, given that ‘no va’ translates as ‘doesn’t go’. Ooops.

But we’re wondering if  Gazprom were really concentrating that hard when they decided to call their Nigerian venture Nigaz?

There’s rather entertaining mini-exhibition that D&AD have put together where a host of well known designers and ad-men have dug out slightly dodgy early work, with accompanying captions. It’s called Everyone starts somewhere and is on show at New Blood this week, or online here.

Johnson banks’ Michael Johnson was asked to find something early and embarassing from the back on his plan chest: here’s an over-worked agency brochure from the late 80s, followed by some choice exampes from other designers.

Michael Johnson

Prior to working at Sedley Place I had been out of England for a couple of years, and returned to a design community in the thrall of the new typography from the likes of the Why Nots and Octavo. I fancied myself as an expressive typographer too, and set about turning what should have been a straightforward brochure into a typo-tour-de-force. Only snag was this was pre-computer and every page had to be meticulously hand rendered, then typeset, then re-rendered and re-set. It took four months, and eventually Sedley Place fired me. Can’t blame them really, in retrospect.

Mark Farrow

This was my first sleeve for Factory Records. I used to work in a really cool record shop on a Saturday. Everybody involved in the Manchester music scene bought their records or just hung out there, seven-inch singles covered every inch of wall space, it was an inspiration in itself. I became friends with the boys who eventually became the Stockholm Monsters so it was natural for them to ask me to design their sleeve when they signed to Factory. At last a Factory Records sleeve, I cannot explain how much I wanted to design one. The type came from an old book I found in the studio where I was a junior in my day job. There wasn’t an entire alphabet but there were all the characters I needed. Much photocopying and paste up followed, then it was down to Granada studios to nervously present my idea to Tony Wilson. I told him I couldn’t decide which colour I preferred, he suggested I do both, how very Factory. I’ve kind of expected that attitude of every client I have had since.

Nick Bell

Inspired by the Dutch graphic design of the time, this overwrought theatre poster was my very first commission on going it alone after a year working for Siobhan Keaney in 1988. Without a budget, I shot the image myself using the flat of a friend (Howard Milton’s sister) whom I used to cat-sit for in Battersea. The limited wide-angle on my lens meant I was balanced precariously on top of a stepladder. The name of the playwright ‘Yeats’ on a piece of board was wired to the tripod (also on top of the step-ladder) and reflected into the lens by a small vanity mirror I was holding close to the camera – it also reflected in the venetian blinds. Photoshop children don’t know they are born! The model was one of my flatmates – we shared a dilapidated hovel in post-boom busted south London.

Simon Waterfall

When I should have been eating sweets and cutting class to go down the Arcades in Brighton, me and my bezzer mate started a Computer Games company, called Silicon Genetic Ltd. It sounded important and professional but this was an age when everyone worked out of their garage and bedrooms, swapping “tapes” in the playground and buying magazines each month for any tips on how to make these plastic boxes work. We played and later programmed games for Commodore 64 and Amiga, they were the most expensive things we had ever owned and treated them like altars where we would over time, sacrifice our social skills, childhood and skin complexion. We had lunch meetings in the Grand Hotel in our school uniforms and eventually had an office with about nine staff, this is one of the rare few games we made that actually went to market, and one of the few that sold! We were sixteen.

There’s that infamous quote attributed to everyone and anyone about ‘half my advertising is wasted but I don’t know which half’...*

Long and tedious train journeys this week revealed that perhaps more than half is wasted when it comes to underground adverts. Of course when you’re stuck on a platform you’ll often read the large posters facing (or cross-tracks as they’re known). But when you’re inside a carriage, you can’t see them, so you don’t.

Travelling to and from Clapham Common this week we noticed at one stop how perfectly the Kennington sign sat framed in the window of the carriage. Then it occurred  - look around and the symbols are placed exactly at the height to be easily read through carriage windows, about a third of the way up the wall, so customers know which stop they’ve reached. Logical really, and just something you take for granted.

Now try to read an ad through the window and what do you see? Er, ‘borghini?’.

Maybe some trainers?

Or some orange flowers?

Turns out that ‘borghini’ was actually part of an ad for English newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, the trainers were Skechers and the Orange flowers were actually Easyjet.

My point is, of course, that advertisers could probably get way more bangs for their bucks if they placed important information, websites, logos et al about a third of the way up their poster. Of course that doesn’t correspond with most agencies’ view of where a logo should go (usually a happy variant on that familiar art direction theme, ‘buried in the bottom corner’).

Here’s an example from our travels. Quite a nice ad for MBT trainers, logo bottom right. Ad ignored inside carriage.

Of course what these ads would look like logos, URLs and end-lines hovering halfway up the poster remains to be seen. But at least they would be seen.

* Usually attributed to William Lever, as in Lever brothers: ‘Half my advertising money is wasted. The problem is that I don't know which half!’

In April we mentioned an odd project that fell out of this year’s Design Auction, when young design company Teacake offered their design services for free on a project of the bidder’s choice, a lot that drew the attention of the marketing team at Land Securities.

We offered to show the final product here on Thought for the Week, so as promised, here we are, with a few of the original ideas for good measure. The brief was for a poster set for the Land Securities environmental conference, themed ‘Past, Present and Future’.

Some of Teacake’s early ideas covered these kind of themes...

...then an idea based on traffic lights emerged as the design dark horse, especially when coupled with the idea of printing the posters together, pre-perforated for easy separation.

The idea that won through was of a building block image set that hinted at the theme in the way the images modulated (the ‘future’ poster is at the top of this post).

Land Securities client Tom Foulkes seems upbeat about the process - ‘it wasn’t the easiest of projects - lots of stakeholders, from varying backgrounds with various vested interests’.

He admits that he wanted to use the traffic lights idea- ‘I thought that the perforations and running all three posters together was a really interesting idea and helped to reinforce the 'traffic light' concept. I thought the graphical route of past, present and future was a little safe but still very nice. I think the route we chose was excellent and has created three stunning posters.’

So, there you go. Well done Teacake, and all from a random bit of bidding at a student auction. When we heard about the lot we heard a few alarm bells and wondered what could possibly happen, but actually it seems to have had a happy ending.

Stroll down London’s Dover Street and this rather imposing chap will stare out at you from the window of Philip Mould’s Gallery. If you’re a regular Antiques Roadshow viewer (and more people watch it than they might admit), Mould himself is a regular expert providing on-the-spot provenance, insight, yarns, and yes valuations too.

Anyway, go inside the gallery (if they’ll let you in - pretend you’re loaded) and this imposing painting of Sir John Conroy by Henry Pickersgill, RA (1782-1875) reveals its other side - the most incredible ‘back’ which  describes in meticulous detail Conroy’s life, his decorations, how many portraits like this existed (three) and that this one was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837.

A judicious trawl on the Philip Mould website reveals that Conroy himself exerted substantial control over the young Queen Victoria - ‘Victoria was never allowed to be alone, had to sleep in her mother’s bedroom, and was restricted to specially selected visitors. Conroy’s power was such that William IV called him ‘King John’.’

You don't see the backs of priceless oil paintings that often - this is worth the visit for the stories told alone. This is what the painting really looks like.

This evening D&AD gathered for its annual pencil fest and the stand-out result must be that a previously unknown 26 year old designer has won the most coveted award, a black pencil, for his coin designs. That designer is Matthew Dent.

Anyone only vaguely interested in the communications business will wonder what all the fuss is about - don’t designers and advertisers give each other gongs with unnerving regularity? And it's true that if there was an award for best use of lime green and sans serif type in corporate identity design, they'd give that out every month, quite easily.

But a black pencil is something else. Many designers struggle to win just a single yellow pencil in their lifetime, and there’s no doubt that it’s getting harder and harder every year. So black pencils are, generally, a once in a lifetime event (unless you work for Apple Computers). The Partners only won their first one last year, for goodness sake, after decades in business. Minale Tattersfield have never won one, even at their height. Pentagram haven’t won one for at least 20 years, by our reckoning.

So for young Dent to enter a coin design competition, have his designs shortlisted against none other than David Gentleman, win the day, see his coins come out to unanimous acclaim, then win the highest prize, at his first attempt? It doesn’t get any better.

It just goes to show - a really great idea backed up by a visionary client, followed through to the highest level of detail can still happen. There’s hope for us all.

Last week we were at the opening of Super Contemporary at the Design Museum, which according to their site blurb, ‘celebrates the fearlessly progressive spirit of London's greatest creative minds, past and present’.

Phew. Heady stuff. But, actually rather well done. In the middle of the room are a series of commissions by the likes of Ron Arad, Thomas Heatherwick and Tom Dixon, but it’s the walls that will interest most design visitors, which are covered in a continuous timeline of captions, images and items.

In various cases are items of intrigue, like this copy of Oz magazine from the late sixties.

The structure works well - you can read the ‘wall’...

...then examine a Barney Bubbles Hawkwind cover at your leisure, for example.

There are other scattered gems, like this wooden model of the original Channel 4 logo from the early eighties.

As you might expect, decades such as the seventies and eighties follow very much the now received wisdom of what was culturally significant - the obligatory Saville and Brody pieces, for example. Had this exhibition appeared twenty years ago, Barney Bubbles may not have appeared, but now he does (history’s so much easier in hindsight, isn’t it?)

Not everything confirms to the certified canon: Roundel’s seminal scheme for RailFreight appears out of the blue. 

And later even The Partners’ 'Grand Tour’ project makes an appearance.

So all round an interesting and eclectic selection, and worth a visit. Even a couple of johnson banks projects made the cut - this 90s piece for the proposed extension at the V&A features...

...as do our Fruit and Veg stamps for the Royal Mail from 2003/4.

Super Contemporary is at the Design Museum until the 4th October. Apologies for the blurry camera phone pictures.

I’ve just finished two days external examining at Kingston University’s Graphics course, and as with last year I thought it would be interesting to post some of the highlights.

So, and in no particular order (and apologies, very image-heavy post, but worth it)...

Helena Peristiani and Katie Peake wanted to point out just how much animal products are in the everyday foods we take for granted.

Amie Herriott set about doing photographic self-portraits, like this. But if you’re wondering how she got that odd effect...

..it’s because the image above is actually the negative. She had actually painted herself in reverse but positive, if that makes any sense (see below for what was actually photographed). Extraordinary.

James Reynolds decided he wanted to document the last suppers requested by inmates on death row.

Whilst Matthew Murphy quite rightly suspected there might be some great imagery to be found at the casusalties union, which provides made-up actors to help train medical professionals.

Keeping on the grotesque theme, Elishea Nicholson and Alex Elnaugh decided the way to deter bike thieves was to make bikes more unattractive, hence their ‘fat bike’.

Poppy Hennig has been looking at clubs and clans (so housewives and bookgroups, very subtly branded).

James Reynolds (below and at the top of this post) felt that his local closed-down pub left a bit to be desired, visually, so set about providing some temporary solutions for those boarded up doors and windows.

Unsurprisingly, several students attacked green issues. Hannah Rödde discovered that The Independent wates tonnes of ink just printing the colour bars on the edges of the paper, and produced these CMYK publications in protest.

Amie Herriott wants us to encourage us to leave the ‘leaf litter’ in our gardens, which will  increase the number of wild birds visiting. This bird is constructed from various leaf skeletons.

Tess Savina has been wondering if some more radical ligatures could save on printing ink.

Meanwhile a group of students (Laura Bowman, Ashley Maine, Jamie Breach, Lewis Woolner and Elliott Mariess) constructed this amazing skeleton out of disposable cutlery.

Owen Evans wants us to take care of the temperature of children. He’s designed this heat-sensitive baby-gro... 

...that gives you a subtle tip if junior is overheating.

Meanwhile another group (Nick Robinson, Sam Mohabeer, Renée Callebaut and Tom Carey) have been making shoes from, er, laces. Can’t remember why, but they look great.

Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson have done various interesting projects. This first one simply plots how much actual ink it takes up to draw typographic samples of varying weight.

And this is a lovely animation for HP that doesn’t make that much sense as stills, but I’ll post a link when Tom gets it up on Vimeo.

I really liked Ella Collinge’s response to the question, ‘what’s around the corner?’.

And Sean Chilvers produced a neat riff on vanity culture with these window-based frames for Grazia.

It’s not all high-falutin’ concept stuff. I liked Charlie Crook’s ready made type sampling and printing operation.

And a team led by Jo Bell, Elishea Nicolson and Charlie Crook produced these interesting posters that re-interpret the traditional type specification (for Architype Renner and Futura Black).

I also had a quick look at the first and second year stuff too - here’s some stand-out work by James Titterton, who offered his body up as light sensitive material for a suntan pattern, then exhibited himself. As you do.

I liked this too - of one a series of portraits where the normal shutter trigger was replaced with a new one that only worked when subjected to extremely loud noise. OK, shouting.

All images chosen entirely objectively and on a ‘what will work on a blog’ basis. Apologies for typos and missing favourites, all images of course copyright of all the people credited.

The Kingston show itself opens on this Saturday and the highlights will be on show at D&AD’s New Blood from the 29th June to 1st July.

By Michael Johnson

One of the posts we got the most mail about last year was this one, on the slightly forgotten British designer, John Gorham.

Several people have been lobbying hard for a book on Gorham for some time, but the project stalled due to lack of funding. The prime movers in the book research, Beryl McAlhone and Howard Brown, have agreed that some selected highlights of that project could appear here, so over the next few weeks we’re going to show some of the projects, and the tales and stories that were gathered as research for the book.

Exhibit one: that classic poster, followed by Gorham’s memories of its creation.

John Gorham I have learned over years of experience that you cannot consciously come up with a witty idea. It is a subconscious process. You have to rely on your brain to work for you. The answer often comes from something accidental. A good example is the poster I did with Howard Brown for the Jack Gold film Red Monarch, a black comedy about Stalin. As we were chatting after the private screening in Soho, Howard suggested it might be quite interesting to put a red nose on Stalin. I liked that, because the guy was a clown. But he was a tyrant as well, so I knew a red nose wasn’t enough.

We were walking back along Old Compton Street when I suddenly knew what it ought to be. A tomato. Somebody has thrown a tomato at the image of a tyrant, and it ends up hitting his nose. That gets over the two opposing elements, the political and comic, and brings them together.

I don’t think the tomato idea would ever have happened to me if I hadn’t bought a book of Michael English’s pop paintings a few weeks earlier. One image fascinated me – a tomato splattered on a wall with pips and juice dripping down. That image was somewhere in my mind, and when I was thinking about this problem, my mind picked it up. What is lovely about solving jobs this way is that a graphic idea will formulate its own way of putting down an image. Ideas seldom repeat themselves in terms of technique. The technique comes from the idea, so it is fresh. Another plus for this kind of thinking is that you get such fun out of it. You entertain yourself. I have had many thrilling moments of sheer elation.

David Puttnam When John brought in the rough for Red Monarch, I remember thinking, if only the movie was as good as the poster, we’d be in great shape.

Howard Brown At the Cannes Film Festival, the producer told us they had a hard time keeping enough Red Monarch posters on the streets. People kept tearing them down and taking them home.

We had a meeting recently at the London base of the starchitects, Foreign Office Architects.

At first sight their reception space seems more like a storeroom, until we realised that they simply were displaying their most prized models, on top of their packing cases. A sort of public storeroom, if you like.

It creates a really interesting effect, with these intricate and highly detailed, cased trophies sitting on top of crude, ‘this-way-up’ sticker-emblazoned timber boxes.

Fantastic. And left us feeling rather two-dimensional.

Having pored over Malcolm Gladwell’s first two books (The Tipping Point and Blink) I’d eagerly bought his newest, Outliers, in hardback. But several reviewers chipped away at it, and its central premise, namely that genius isn’t necessarily born, but cultivated by circumstance, luck and good old-fashioned hard graft. So I delayed reading it, until last week and of course the reviewers are wrong - Gladwell has delivered again.

The most memorable of his memes this time around is a recurring stat in the background of the world’s most successful people. It’s a simple one: the 10,000 hour rule.

Bill Gates put in thousands of hours as a teenager learning to code on huge university machines. The Beatles spent years in Hamburg playing eight hour gigs and came back to England perfectly formed. Away from Gladwell but still relevant, jazz is crammed with examples of virtuoso guitarists and saxophonists who honed natural promise with years and years of relentless practice. Even modern day musicians admit that they learned their craft the hard way: Rage against the Machine’s Tom Morello was at Harvard by day but spent 8 hours every night learning how to play in his own unique style.

But what about designers? As I read Gladwell’s thesis, I kept wondering whether Gladwell’s theories carry over. Do designer’s emerge fully formed out of college with 10,000 hours under their belt, geniuses in waiting?

Well, let’s think – a student in the UK might devote 10 weeks to graphics at foundation, and then in theory, 90 weeks in a three year course. How many hours a week? Let’s make our average student quite conscientious and make them work an 8 hour day. That’s 4,000 hours in total. So if they’ve been a normal, fairly dutiful student for 4 years (but still taken holidays and put their feet up at Easter and Xmas) they’d come out of college having only just scratched the surface of the necessary 10,000.

This quick bit of maths obviously doesn’t cater for the keen-beans who then go on and do an MA. Imagine a design-boffin who works 6 days a week, 9 hours a day and only takes 4 weeks off the whole year, and keeps that up for five years? Number of hours = 12,960. Phew, instant genius (and that’s not even counting their foundation course). But does every graduate of every MA design course go on to become the next Jonathan Ive or Neville Brody? Probably not - there must be other factors at hand.

Gladwell points out some of these, like lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. Bill Gates gained access to computers before many others, but was also born at a time when opportunities opened up for him alone in his late-teens.

In graphic design, Alan Fletcher, Colin Birdsall and Bob Gill set up their company in early sixties London when there were virtually no other ideas-based design companies in existence. Wolff and Olins met a few years later and immediately realised no-one in the UK could offer their combination of business thought and creative insight. Why Not Associates met at the RCA, absorbed Gert Dumbar’s teaching and graduated fully-formed in the late eighties, their signature style differentiating them almost immediately from London’s dull ‘corporate’ designers of the day. The recession of the early nineties claimed many victims in the design business, so when the now world-beating Turner Duckworth set up in 1992, they were virtually the only start-up that year.

Whilst every few years, a fully formed design group emerges from courses like the RCA, for most of Britain’s designers a different set of rules seem to apply in design. Although a deeply unfashionable doctrine, it still seems to hold that a good four or five years after graduation is needed for a designer to begin to find their feet (usually by their late-twenties).

Designer Siobhan Keaney once said to me that ‘designers learn in their twenties, make their mark in their thirties, and consolidate in their forties’. When she said this, I was in my twenties and of course firmly believed that everything I produced was the best thing since sliced bread. In retrospect, there are about 2 and bit projects from my twenties that I would even consider showing anyone and the rest should be left to grow mould in the metaphorical bin. It became clear that some serious work at the design coalface was needed before standing any chance of creating anything genuinely new (and get anywhere near those 10,000 hours).

Students reading this might be appalled that they might not get really into their stride for another decade. But consider this – Alan Fletcher was in his thirties when he set up FFG, and was forty when he co-started Pentagram. Hardly a spring chicken. As for what happens after your forties, Weiden + Kennedy London partner Tony Davidson offered this thought: ‘It’s hard when you get older. Your energy levels go down.  You refer back to what you know. You become less of a dreamer and more of a realist. My favourite creative folks are the ones who have the ability to keep their minds young and continue to challenge themselves late into their careers.’

But returning to the original thesis – are great designers born or nurtured? Michael Wolff had these observations. ‘We’re the sum of our genetics and also how we choose to interpret the influences of our environment - who we meet, or love, or want to be like, or envy. Like chimps, we’re insatiable mimics and like human beings we crave approval and admiration. If we’re lucky enough to envy the most relevant and effective people on our journeys, our influences and inspirations work well for us. And if we’re lucky with our DNA that’s helpful too. Not sure where or how creativity that’s innately our own gets developed, or if time does make much difference other than to reveal what we think of as embarrassments and mistakes that we choose not to repeat’.

Alan Dye, of London’s NB Studio, feels that ‘anyone with 10,000 hours of practice would be good at anything, but I truly believe you can’t make a great designer, it has to part of you, run in your blood. You need the spark, the intuition and the rest of the cliches.’

One thing is common to the designers who break through – a determination and willingness to keep trying, day after day, to find something new. As Jessica Helfand remarked to me, ‘strength of personality is huge’ - as she pointed out the sheer doggedness of the handful of designers I’d asked for their opinion on this.

And it’s still true, I think, that anyone can break into this business, if you’re determined enough. But Gladwell’s right: it doesn’t happen overnight and short-circuiting the process rarely works. Those 10,000 hours have to happen and are embedded in the foundations of most of the best designer’s careers. As for the lucky breaks along the way (or how to create your own luck), well perhaps that’s the subject of his next book.

By Michael Johnson

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell is available here in hardback. The author discusses the book itself here.

Here are some of the recent ‘timepieces’ submitted in the last couple of months.

Andy Kidd has been busy, musing on the world’s time zones (above and below)...

...and also commentating on the the meltdown in the world’s financial markets.

Natalie Talbot has been making posters out of hama beads for a project - ‘I thought about how tiny they were and how long it would take to count the buggers!’ Good point Natalie.

Matthew Herz took this photo of a ‘building is losing a battle to time. New materials prop it up as if it needs crutches, a walker, hip replacement surgery.’

Meanhwile Cameron Byerley has been photographing pendulums (as you do). ‘The pendulum swings erratically according to no set pattern. It's position can't be predicted as a function of time. It's position can be captured as hundreds of images and the probability of where it will be at any given time is given by the darkness of the color in the photo’.

Meanwhile, a big clear-up at a Johnson shed has revealed johnson junior’s decade of cricket bats. Trouble is, he’s still not that great at cricket.

This project stems from a section on our main site dedicated to people’s responses to an open brief of Time. Feel free to send us your ideas (info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk), the best ones are posted here on Thought for the week.

Swanswell is a drug and alcohol rehabilitation service based across the Midlands in the UK. When the trust approached us last year with their chosen, legacy name, we were a little unsure at first until we began to see that the ‘well’ at the end of the word could be of use.

Various typographic experiments followed, before the discovery that a piece of paper, crumpled at one end, could act as a suitable metaphor for someone’s life smoothing itself out.

We agreed with the client that it would be best if there were several different versions of the logo, in varying degrees of ‘crumple’, so we’ve agreed on six.

We’ve also developed a family of useful words and phrases that can be used as headlines and copy for posters and leaflets. Here’s an example.

Here are some of them used on a poster.

One of the most intriguing applications is their business cards. A little disappointed when shown traditional cards, we then showed them a rather more unusual idea. Each employee receives a small book of one colour cards...

...and when they want to give out a card, they remove one from the pad, scrunch one end, then hand over a carefully crumpled business card, a physical demonstration of their logo (and service) first-hand.

Another part of the scheme will be a suite of photos that we’ve taken of crumpled family situations. Drug and alcohol dependence places great pressure on families and relationships, so we decided it would be useful to have images like these, for certain applications (although we have to use them with care).

Here are more posters and stationery.

The scheme started to roll-out late last year, and more and more applications are coming through now. We’re working on some stop-frame animations too, here’s a quick sample. Apologies for the slightly crude embedding.

Swanswell logo animation from johnson banks on Vimeo.

Thanks to our project partners on the Swanswell project, Brand Guardians. The project photographers were Alex Kent and Pete Gay, animaton images by Andrew Penketh.

For this year’s Christian Aid week (which starts in the UK this Sunday) we’ve developed an unusual theme where Christian Aid’s envelope-based logo has become a blood bag.

Christian Aid Week is Britain’s longest running fundraising week, having started in 1957, and raises around £15 million for the charity every year. 

A thin red line of blood-red ink then connects the typographic headlines and is used as a linking device in all the print we’ve developed for the campaign (see below).

This work builds on work we carried out two years ago in 2007 when we turned the logo into a grow-bag and followed a general ‘gardening’ and cultivation theme.

The Christian Aid Week envelope is still one of the charity’s most powerful fundraising tools: 17.5 million of these envelopes will be distributed over the coming week.

We’ve just received a series of images from last week’s Blank Canvas event, where various designers from around the world customised junk objects found in charity shops.

The eventual list of participants was pretty good, and included a customised skateboard by Milton Glaser and LA art gurus Kozyndan’s adaptation of a Marilyn photo...

...Supermundane’s super teapot...

...and various American Pentagram partners’ offerings (here’s Paula Scher’s customised teapot).

In total just over £2,500 was raised for Ravensbourne College’s Moving Image and Graphics department final show.

Highest sale on the night was ICO’s ‘The Scream’, which sold for £140. As organiser Megan Riera told us, ‘I had given them a framed print of Munch's The Scream, and they had it reframed and painted it completely white except for a small black box which had the word's 'The Scream by Edvard Munch’ written in miniscule letters. When you got up close to read it, a motion sensor was triggered, and a series of blood curdling screams were let out!’

With some sneaky silent bidding we managed to buy Michael Bierut’s Sak’s-like-Oxo-cube-like remix of on a old OXO poster. Just over 100 English pounds. Bargain.

Well done to Ravensbourne for pulling it off, and as all agreed, next year it would be nice to have a little more time to exhibit, see everything properly and do some cannier bidding. But a great start.

Last week saw The Art Directors Club of New York give out their prizes, and our odd ‘barrel art’ project for Glenfiddich from last year won a bronze ‘cube’.

It’s a project that sits outside the normal design classificiations so we’re pleasantly surprised to see that it’s doing well in competitions. Last week it was accepted twice into the D&AD Annual and also Creative Review’s annual round-up of work.

There’s more about the project here if you want to read more, and a full list of ADC winners here. This year’s bronze follows on from last year’s gold for our Beatles stamps. Congratulations to the British gold-award winners who included Poke, MARK Studio and Turner Duckworth.

We’ve just finished our submission for Blank Canvas.

This is a nice variant on the ‘student auction’ theme, where Ravensbourne students have asked various designers to take an everyday, supplied object (sourced from charity shops and car boot sales) and customise it.

We were sent a rather gorgeous ‘Pinehouse’ wooden clock, that after some thought we’ve revamped with a lot of white paint, a new clock mechanism and four flies.

We’ve also customised the clock itself. By removing the hour hand, the time (in minutes and seconds) really does fly.

Here’s how it looked when we got it. Lovely.

Good luck to the Blank Canvas team for tomorrow's auction. There’s more information here, and you can see other partipants’ pieces and bid on items here.

One of the problems of ‘branding’ as a day job it that it’s an imprecise science.

However many processes, diagrams and formulas we hide behind, even the projects that we hold up as ‘successes’ are rarely dependent on just a change of visual identity alone. For example, most would deem the Tate’s rebrand a positive change, but would it have seen that way without Herzog & de Meuron’s seminal makeover of that power station? Perhaps not.

Away from the blue-chip’s who treat on-going tracking and awareness as givens, it gets very difficult to prove, definitively, that a designer’s part of a project was the critical element, rather than just one part of a bundle of changes. You can offer up examples and indicators, but hard, irrefutable facts are sometimes hard to come by.

I’m reminded of this by several painful and ultimately unsuccessful tender applications and Mark Sinclair’s thoughtful piece for May’s Creative Review. Whilst Sinclair’s emphasis is upon the Olympics (and rightly queries whether that is ever going to be a happy process) my thoughts have turned to more general tenders.

I’m quoted in Sinclair’s piece as not having received much feedback as to why our applications might have failed, but since giving that comment we did actually receive a longish email in return. It explained that a couple of the case studies we’d presented lacked enough provable, evidence of success.

The hard facts are sometimes there. Save the Children is big enough to employ ongoing tracking, so we now know that since our work on the UK brand, unprompted awareness has nearly doubled.

We also know that Royal and SunAlliance’s attempts at ‘direct’ insurance (ie phone and web) left them floundering at 13th in the charts until the change to More Th>n at the turn of the century. This led to a huge turn in fortunes (they’re now one of the UK’s biggest).

But our work for the BFI and the Art Fund is trickier to measure. To us, and to the client, the introduction of their new identity for the BFI has helped re-establish them as the UK’s guardian of film, coupled with the opening of their BFI Southbank site.

It’s much clearer that they run the London Film Festival and the Imax at Waterloo. But they didn’t carry out extensive awareness research pre and post re-brand – it was simply obvious to everyone that something drastic was needed, and was done. But ‘obvious’ is a qualitative term, not quantitative. One’s man’s obvious is another’s subtle.

Our Art Fund project has helped stem the decline in membership and now a revitalised organisation partners regularly with the Crafts Council and Tate, and has taken over The Museum Prize from the Gulbenkian.

Their increased self-confidence, and realisation that they truly can be an art charity, in every sense, has helped them lobby publicly for ideas they believe in (like Steve McQueen’s stamps series) or raise money for works like Turner’s Blue Rigi in a matter of days. Now, how much of this can be ascribed to identity change? It’s difficult to know. Did the new brand help them change or did the internal changes hasten the visual shift?

Put that in a one-page case study and it sounds a little fluffy (whereas present it with 25 slides of applications and things are completely different).

Both The Art Fund and BFI changed character and direction, and their brands needed to react accordingly. Significant corporate shifts often go hand in hand with identity change – Wally Olins once said, ‘identity is change made visible’ - and he’s right.

The vast majority of these projects, whether trackable or not, coincide with significant changes in the boardroom and market forces compelling organisations to act. In some ways discussing whether Tate’s re-brand ‘worked’ or not is irrelevant – the arrival of the new building forced Serota, his team and Wolff Olins to deal with the family of Tate galleries as a whole. Without the new building, Pentagram’s unassuming typographic predecessor might easily have continued.

But this doesn’t solve the conundrum of proof. Every year effectiveness awards are stuffed with examples that many of us react to with horror – but they have the stats to prove that their new pack, that flash on their pizza box, that revamped beer can all had the desired effect in terms of sales. It’s simple really, all things remained the same EXCEPT the packs. If the sales go up, packs win prizes, however much they offend our design sensibilities.

Sometimes this is galling for those of us cradling an inbox full of notes of thanks and appreciation, but not many hard, physical stats. Luckily there are still clients around who will look at some of these projects and make reasoned and rounded decisions, without the need for KPI’s, effectiveness charts and hard-nosed ‘quant’.

But maybe, just maybe, we might start persuading a few of them to research how bad things are, before we start making good. Maybe.

By Michael Johnson

As a general rule, we’re not too concerned with looking backwards. Any design company that spends any time resting on their laurels (especially at the moment) is asking for trouble, after all.

But a few nice links from elsewhere, and the rise and rise of great sites dedicated to typography made us dig out the the slides for what is now a really old set of posters (mid-nineties, we think). They were done for a then substantial paper client. Mind you, didn’t everyone have substantial paper clients then?

We’d agreed that the best way to get the message out for their new paper advice service was a set of posters that spelled out what was on offer, all written ‘with’ their paper. Or using the machinery of bookbinding and sample-making. So here’s ‘dummies’, for example.

Actually easier said than done. It was all very well doing a few quick visuals but getting them photographed nicely and working together was much trickier than we thought. And the shadows were very tricky (all pre-computer of course and involving countless hours of expensive repro).

Here are a few edits. Always liked the corrugated letters.

And some more of the posters themselves, ‘samples’ and ‘help’.

Just looked it up: they date from 1994 and were done for James McNaughton Paper, photography by Martin Barraud.

A few weeks ago at The Design Auction one of the oddest lots of the evening was that offered up by young design company Teacake, who as well as a goodie-bag of stuff offered their design services for free on a project of the bidder’s choice.

This sparked a bidding war between two eagle-eyed clients, a war eventually won by Land Securities.

To be fair to Land Securities, although they were probably tempted to just give them 47 email templates to format, they’ve given Teacake a very nice poster brief for an up-and-coming Land Securities Environment conference .

And we’ve offered to show the development of said project on here. That way everyone’s happy (or something like that). Anyway, contract is drawn up, design has started. We wait to see. No pressure guys.

There’s a piece about it here in Design Week

This week it’s the Friends of St Bride Library Conference, themed around ‘Revival’.

There are talks from all manner of people over the two days (23rd and 24th), including Henrik Kubel unveiling his great project digitising New Rail Alphabet, in six weights, a revival of Margaret Calvert’s 1965 signing face for British Rail.

Ben Terrett & Russell Davies of The Really Interesting Group will talk about the role of printing and paper in a post-digital world, and hopefully revealing what ‘post-digital’ actually means. And amongst many other speakers over two days there will be ongoing demonstrations by calligraphers, lettercutters and signwriters.

Senior johnson banks’ designers, Kath Tudball and Julia Woollams will be talking about OABs (old-age brands) such as the BFI, Save the Children and the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, and how we’ve been trying to turn them around.

The full line-up is here if you want to find out more. 

BBH’s crowspring experiment, as discussed this week, seems to perplexing them as well.

Quoted here from their BBH Labs blog:

First, many of the designs being presented seem to be slapped together without much care or thought. As a client, it is taking considerable time to filter through, which adds a cost to the bottom line of my company.

Well, there’s a surprise.

And this:

The bigger issue I have is fair remuneration. The Crowdspring design process is fully transparent and this is great. When I comment on my likes and dislikes regarding a specific design, other designers take note and follow suit, sometimes, very literally, borrowing the basic typography of one designer and then building off it. Fantastic from the client’s perspective: I’m getting the best of the individual and the best of the crowd - all for one price! Now the problem is that I can only award one person the job and it isn’t fair for me to reward that person 100% for work that may have been built off another person’s work.

Given that our ‘dollar per idea’ prediction has very nearly happened, it’s hard to feel sorry for the BBH Labs team having to sift through the entries, and decide on a winner.

Hurry everyone, the ‘competition’ ends tomorrow. Only 1337 designs in the pot, as of today.

We’re getting some mixed messages from the world-renowned ad agency, BBH (Bartle Bogle Hegarty). Only last week many were applauding their decision to offer a 3.5 percent pay cut to all their staff rather than make redundancies (a decision that was voted on by all their staff). Last year they were in the top-hundred ‘best companies to work for’. Their website proclaims their ethical stance: ‘business isn’t worth doing if you can’t do it in good conscience’.

Trouble is, someone from within their now vast network that spans the globe across six offices, employing 928 people with a total billings of $1,500,000,000 has decided that the new logo for their BBH Labs offshoot should be designed via the Crowdspring website (which we blogged about a few weeks ago).

Slightly less than $1.5billion is at stake, try, er $500. That’s if if they see a logo they like and then another $1,000 for stationery. Ah, ok then, that makes it better.

To be fair, in their brief they do say ‘in exploring new approaches to creative collaboration, we post this brief well aware of the debate around the Crowdspring business model within the design community. Our interest lies in finding fresh, new creative talent efficiently. It is not in our interest to undercut existing market value design fees. Therefore we appeal to the Crowdspring community in the same way our prospective clients would approach ad agencies in an open pitch. We ask that designers submit only rough comps to this brief’.

We’d imagine that they’re pretty pleased then with the  1086   (Update: 1749) entries so far, mainly riffing around their agency symbol, the black sheep. Give that there are still three days to go to the deadline, perhaps they’ll get 1,500 entries, which would be a simple equation of a dollar per idea. Wouldn’t that be nice and neat?

Maybe their next move will be to ask for some ideas for their new client, eBAY Europe, just won, an account worth a rather hefty £22 million pounds? Perhaps not.

It’s difficult to write an end-line for this. Suffice it to say it’s a ‘white sheep’ approach to commissioning design that we would never have expected from an agency of BBH’s stature.

In case you’re wondering, the black sheep reference comes from this old BBH ad for one of their landmark clients, Levis.

Thanks to Pierre for the tip. Feel free to send us your views on this.

Illustration magazine Varoom recently asked johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson to nominate a compelling image as part of a series chosen by designers and art directors. His choice is discussed below.

Name of chosen work
‘Tote Bäume’ (Dead Trees) poster,
by Swiss designer Niklaus Troxler (shown above)
 
Name of Artist
Niklaus Troxler
 
Date of image
1992
 
Why did you choose this image?
There are two designers whose line-based work I've always loved, Shigeo Fukuda and Troxler. I could choose virtually anything by either of them, but these bloodied tree stumps have always got me. Fukuda himself said of this poster that it was ‘a requiem to our silent planet’.
 
What is its most important quality?
I've always loved the way that with just three colours, some wobbly-lined illustrations, and no type, Troxler created such a powerful way to illustrate the plight of the environment. Deeply minimal, deeply moving.
 
How would you describe your taste in imagery?
For years I’ve loved photography, perhaps less so now. But I’ve got no time for illustration that looks like illustration - the effect of all that ‘wine-bar-graphics’ from the 80s still fills me with horror.
 
Who are your favorite image makers?
It would have to be the classic photographers like Irving Penn...

and Robert Frank...

But Fletcher and Chermayeff's collages, Fukuda and Troxler? Perhaps I'm more drawn to illustration than I thought...
 
Photography or illustration?
20 years ago, photography. No contest. But now? Photoshop seems to have (paradoxically) removed photography's element of surprise. I think we’re now in a culture of anything goes, and a culture where the lines between illustrator, artist design and photographer are increasingly (and happily) blurred.

Issue 9 of Varoom Magazine is out now and is dedicated to illustrative type

I have very few quibbles with the iPhone as a piece of communications kit. Its arrival into my life has ironed out many wrinkles, and life generally works a little more seamlessly, thanks to Mr Jobs, Mr Ive and that touch sensitive screen.

The only recurring problem is language. Now, I appreciate that I don’t write in a conventional way. If I want a short sentence, so be it. If ‘if’ or ‘see’ will do, do it, don’t fret. See? But it’s not syntax or sentence structure that my iPhone and I are at loggerheads over. It’s simple, boring old words.

Rightly, or wrongly, I reserve the right to talk in a strange amalgam of slang, business speak and Anglo-Saxon, because, er, well it’s my language and I’ll destroy it if I want to (or something like that). But the iPhone’s predictive typing just doesn’t ‘get’ the words that are in my head. My list of embarrassing moments is almost too long to repeat in public, but as examples only last week  a crucial pdf of costings got forwarded as ‘coatings’, ‘Toby’s’ have become ‘Tony’s’, and ‘Armin’ becomes ‘Army’ or even ‘admin’. The emotional effect of writing a long howler ending with ‘til hell freezes over’ loses a bit of impact when my iPhone religiously changes it to ‘He’ll freezes over’, rendering me both cross and unintelligible (never a great combination).

Bizarrely a one word comment forwarded to a colleague about a particularly difficult client request met with ‘Fish?’ in reply. I was as confused as you until I realised that my email (that was meant to say ‘Eek!’) actually said ‘Eel!’

My northern prediliction for using ‘ta-ra’ (as in good-bye) has taken months to stop being changed to ‘take’ or even weirder, ‘tars’. Anything remotely rustic gets nixed or re-spelt, so ‘blimey’ become ‘blindly’ and ‘bollocks’ becomes ‘bollix!’ How?

Even my initials (‘MJ’) get routinely changed to ‘JK’. Rowling? The furry-hatted Stevie Wonder impersonator, Jay Kay? I have no idea.

Conversely anything vaguely Facebook-esque is converted almost immediately. ‘Lil’ becomes ‘LOL’ (and always in caps). Omg you might say? No ‘OMG!’ And of course every possible valley-girl-wayne’s-world-programmer-geek-speak you can think of works fine, so ‘dude’, ‘totally’, ‘awesome’ and even ‘schwing!!’ get through unharmed.

But the most predictable predictive of the whole thing? However badly you type it, ‘ipho’, ‘iphi’ or ‘ipon’, even ‘iPoo!’ all become ‘iPhone’ (with strategically placed capital) way before you can say blimey (sorry, blindly).

By JK. Not sent from an iPhone.

Well, perhaps not. Yes, we have to admit that yesterday’s wholesale re-brand of US Telecoms behemoth Verizon was indeed an April fool. 

In case you haven’t seen or read, there are 150+ hilarious comments on Brand New about the project, varying from ‘I knew it was a joke immediately, but I still allowed myself to hope for a little while’ to  ‘It'll be interesting to see how something so aggressively European fares in the States. Pat on the back to Verizon for taking the risk’ to ‘With all the established brands changing up their logos (pepsi, kraft foods, walmart to name a few) I am unsure whether this is really an April 1st joke or not. I wouldn't put something like this past Verizon' to ‘I don't think any studio would go to such an effort for an April Fool's joke...’

Just to assure all our readers, no we didn’t spend weeks on this work, and yes we did borrow a few pics from The Sartorialist (thanks, hope no-one is offended, lovely pics by the way). And yes it would be great if a company like Verizon would do something like that, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, back to work everyone.

We’ve just been told we can talk about a huge project we’ve been working on in the States, for the huge telephony and communications company, Verizon. It’s not a name that’s well known in Europe but has 80 million customers over the pond in the States. (A Dow 30 company, Verizon employs a workforce of nearly 224,000 and last year generated consolidated operating revenues of more than $97 billion).

After the recent purchase of Alltel’s 13.2 million customers in a deal valued at $28.1 billion, it was felt this was the perfect time to inject a bit of life into what was looking like a tired brand in a quickly moving sector.

From the start we were keen to reposition Verizon and help it adapt for 21st century communications. Its old look still looked like first generation telecoms, didn’t match with Verizon’s future ambitions and lacked a distinctive tone of voice.

Here’s the old logo, in case you hadn’t seen it.

But customers no longer take heed of concepts of speed, or breadth of network - they just assume those as a given. The new idea stems from several directions, that everyone’s words, text and pictures let them share universal thoughts, together. In addition, we've been developing the crucial new concept of a ‘wireless cloud’ and that comes over most strongly in the new word-marque.

In a radical move the main marque has been redesigned...

...but just as importantly this will be regularly truncated to a shorter, campaign mark.

This allows us to quickly establish a versatile and unique tone of voice for the organisation.

This is what Verizon themselves have to say. "We may have been considered out of the race when we were publicly mocked for having said no to Steve Jobs and Apple's iPhone, letting it go to AT&T," explains Kenley Mizrahi, Senior Vice President of Marketing worldwide, "but at the end of the day we still have the most costumers, and the ‘Very’ campaign is aimed at a million other potential customers by answering their most pressing concerns with a simple answer: Is Verizon a good value? The answer is yes, Very. Is Verizon easy to switch to? Very. Is it reliable? Very. And to sum it up, is Verizon awesome? Very."

Here are some of the initial applications of the work.

The new identity will begin to be phased in starting in July, to coordinate with the launch of the campaign. By that date, all hardware issued by Verizon Wireless will feature the Wireless Cloud logo and one of the brand's most visible icons, the sign emblazoned across its Manhattan headquarters, will feature the new logo prominently for all to see and beckon the very best wireless communications provider.

There’s more information to be found at the pre-launch website, here.

And, although we’re not sure how they got hold of it so quickly, there’s a already a piece on US-based branding blog, Brand New, here.