19.11.07
Questions answered on The Serif

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Design blog The Serif has just published a Q&A session between its readers and johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson. You can read the answers in their new weekly update, published today.

We’ve reprinted Michael’s responses below, as well.

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With a growing number of designers seeming to criticize formal design education, and the increasing costs of university education in countries such as the UK, what do you think of self-taught graphic designers, and if companies such as johnson banks, do indeed hire designers without a degree in design.

Well, in a way I’m self-taught. On paper I did a degree in Marketing + Visual Art, but really I taught myself by reading Meggs, Pioneeers of Modern Typograpy and The Face, then learning by mistakes in real life.

Whilst it’s fashionable to criticize design education, I do think that a design degree from one of the best colleges will still make you pretty employable, and I can see a situation soon when post-grad qualifications will get increasingly important.

As regards johnson banks, I like to think I would employ someone similar to how I was twenty years ago (ie with a half-arsed degree but bucket-loads of enthusiasm), but the vast majority of our designers got firsts at world-famous design colleges. An average degree from an average college may not help you get a job at Pentagram or at johnson banks, I’m afraid, but I think you probably knew that.

Being self-taught could work, especially if it creates a unique style? I have always thought that the ‘truth will out’ in this business, ie if you’re born to be a good graphic designer, it will happen for you. But you’d need to be really good to do it without a degree.

What’s your favourite pizza topping?

Er, well if I’m honest I’m not that fussed about pizza. But I’ll eat my children’s crusts. Does that count?

What would you advise young graduates who have no working experience, other than a 4 months internship?

I wouldn’t advise anyone to take a 4 month internship anywhere, unless it’s somewhere really, really good. I do think that taking paid, month-long internships is a fair strategy and helps you get a useful idea of how different companies work, and the work experience is very useful. From our side of the fence, we would always try someone out as a placement first to see what they’re like – the days of offering someone a job on the spot seem to have gone. But I do hate the idea of unpaid placements, that’s basically slave labour.

As a design student and so concerned with this type of thing, I’d like to know: do you believe it is possible to work ethically as a graphic designer in today’s competitive, corporate business world?

I do think it’s possible, yes. There are a number of newer companies who have set up with an ethical framework in place from the beginning, or a number of companies like johnson banks who have become steadily more cultural/ethical/green/whatever as we’ve got older. But don’t expect to be buying your second house in France if you’re setting off down an ethical path. It would be more realistic to sign up for your local allotment.

Thought for the week is always a thoughtful and interesting read but on a personal level why do you do it? Is it somewhere just to express an opinion or do you believe that it improves your understanding of design by talking about it? Either way always very enjoyable (just wish there was a Thought for the day too).

Hi, well, thanks for your feedback. Good question. Well, I’ve always been interested in design writing – I started writing for the design and advertising magazines in the early nineties. That turned into quite a regular thing, then I wrote Problem Solved in 2002.

I started reading the blogs about a year later, and when we updated our site in 2005, I asked my tecchies to include a page for weekly thoughts. For a while I didn’t take it too seriously (I only averaged a thought per fortnight for a while), but then I started to notice that in a Google search for ‘johnson banks’, ‘thought for the week’ was second on the page. When we looked at the stats we suddenly realized that tens of thousands of people were visiting TFTW on a regular basis - I guess at that point I moved it up a gear, and tried to make sure I had one good thought a month, then at least one good thought a week, and so on. By ‘good’ I mean something genuinely insightful, not just filler.

You have to understand that writing for design journals is great, but slow – by the time you’ve thought of a subject, pitched the idea to an editor, researched it, written it, edited it, found the pics (and got them cleared) it could be 3 months from idea to printed piece - that’s a long time. I do love the fact that I might have a small insight reading the Guardian on a Saturday morning and turn that into a viable piece of writing, in the public domain, only an hour later. It’s very liberating.

Thus far TFTW is still one-way communication (although we do get lots of emails about it). It’s not really a blog yet, more of a monoblog. One of the trickiest aspects of it is trying really hard not to turn it into blatant vanity publishing – people see through that very quickly, I think. I sometimes feel a little odd about writing about our projects, and tend to present them in a very neutral, objective way, and save the deeper analysis for wider topics. Michael Bierut, by contrast, has Design Observer for his thoughts and the Pentagram monoblog for his work which is quite a useful distinction.

I’m also quite aware of the fact that there are still very few established designers who write, and even less who blog. I guess they’re all busy, and most designers still don’t find wordsmithing that easy. I’ve always been comfortable with words, and the main website is very conversational in its tone, so it seems logical to continue that conversation, if you like. I’m sometimes aware of the fact that I may be ‘giving too much away’, but I’m not sure. Maybe the occasional ‘confessional’ isn’t so bad.

I’m busy ploughing my way through the fascinating book ‘designing design’ by japanese graphic designer kenya hara, in just about every chapter he gives another short, sharp definition of what design is, for example: design is the controlling of difference. What would be your definition of design in one sentence?

I sometimes say that I only started johnson banks to find good solutions to interesting problems, and that I guess still applies.

I don’t really have any central edict that drives me – people do say that we are good at distilling complex issues down to simple ideas, and that’s a good rule of thumb, but then we’ll intentionally do something really complicated (like the Think London logo that contains 44 symbols) and fly in the face of what was expected.

I though for a while that I was a closet modernist but then the whole faux-aesthetic-modernist sans serif thing has left me really cold, and makes me want to go off and do various projects in an intentionally ugly way. There is definitely a ‘when others zig, zag’ aspect to how we work. Or should I say ‘when others zag, zig’.

I have been trying to answer the question though – the closest I have to a one sentence answer is that I’m always looking for communication that is verbally unusual and visually unforgettable.

In one of your thought for the week columns you referred to the difficulty agencies and designers face of balancing the more creatively fulfilling work (which is more often than not done for little or no money) and the more profitable work. I just wondered if you have more views on it as certainly from an outsiders perspective johnson banks seem to be one of the few agencies around who seem to get the mix just right.

We have to be very careful. Although people sometimes think we’re working for free for our charity clients, we’re not, we’re just working for less than normal (on average about 60%). We try really hard to balance the beautiful, ‘pinch-me’ stuff with blue-chip work for the likes of More Th>n, Land Securities and odd projects like Blackpool Pleasure Beach. We’ll still pursue interesting side projects like our Send a letter set, or this year’s Airmail project, just because that keeps our brains ticking over. And on paper designing stamps is a long way from highly profitable, but they are very hard to turn down.

What’s true is that, currently, the more interesting work seems to be in the sector we love, the cultural/ethical/charity sector. It’s no coincidence that johnson banks and Wolff Olins often end up on the same pitch list – we’re both interested in the same things. They probably need some serious payers to fund that big machine though - we need less, by dint of our smaller size.

Prior to starting johnson banks I had a lot of different jobs and saw that nearly every company struggled to get the balance of work right. The trick is to do lots of great work, and get paid well for doing it, rather than fund the lovely jobs with a couple of dinosaur clients who you hate working for. That’s when it gets hard, and very few companies pull that off.

Which material item would you most like to receive as a gift this Christmas? I’m not offering by the way!

If I’m honest a 1962 Strat (rosewood neck, sunburst finish, the more battered the better). Failing that a hand-made D-hole Maccaferri jazz guitar. Ta very much.

Seriously though, the best present I could have this Christmas would be an agreement by the world’s governments to actually do something about climate change (rather than just talk about it). I’d happily trade twenty grand’s worth of vintage Strat for that.

How do you stop clients from dictating the design?

As a junior designer, or junior design company, the power is usually all wrong. Clients know you’re inexperienced and pull rank. Most of my twenties were spent getting frustrated at the lack of equality in the relationships I had with my then clients - there was a lot of storming out of meetings, tantrums, all of that clichéd designer stuff. Pretty embarrassing. About the only benefit of getting older in this business is accumulating experience, and a few grey hairs. That puts you in a better position to debate (or even question) the minutae of corporate strategy with a chief executive without anyone pointing at you and shouting ‘imposter!’

Because our big projects always start with a strategic stage, the process has become much more like a partnership anyway, so it’s inappropriate for either party to dictate. We don’t get (and don’t look for) the kind of clients that want to push us around.

After 15 months of blogging our writer has hung up his keyboard (for the time being, at least) because he feels blogging is ’self-indulgent’ and lacks ‘discipline’. Being someone that has a very rounded and useful blog (informed opinion, showcasing great work, offering advice), do you feel other design agencies should follow his example?

I can understand why ‘proper’ writers might find blogs a little unedifying. Rick Poynor wrote tens of thousands of words for the first 3 years of Design Observer then eventually retired from it. I think for ‘proper’ writers the thought of giving away all those insights for free really galls them - in their world words equal money, after all.

I do think there is a spectacular amount of nonsense on design blogs though. There’s one in particular that I only subscribe to because the self-infatuation/nonsense/vanity quotient is so staggeringly high I find it quite hilarious. I regularly pass on the link to people just for amusement.

How do you see your own blog developing? Would it ever replace your main site, for example?

I can see a day when the page rank of TFTW overtakes that of our main site, yes. I think that could happen quite soon. I’m planning the next version of the johnson banks site, and finding a way for a big design company site to have the flexibility of a blog will be quite a design challenge. (Blogs are great, but let’s face it, they look dreadful). And I’m pretty proud of the main johnson banks site - it took a year to design, write and code – I really wish I could deliver some of its drama within permalinkable HTML. We’re working on that.

Your ‘Thought for the Week’ has a global audience. Does that make you think much harder about what you write? And, does that mean you devote too much time to writing your blog, each week?

Once it became apparent that people were (bizarrely) interested in our thoughts I did start to think a bit more about what we were writing. I’ll admit that sometimes the time it takes worries me, but it just forces me to get better at time management. Also, I’ve developed an ever-present notebook/camera mentality and I furiously type or scribble thoughts constantly. I guess if I find that it’s affecting the output of the studio, I’ll have to think of a new way to do it. Not yet though, I don’t think.

By forcing me to write down my thoughts, I’m crystallising concepts and theories much quicker, and it’s definitely helping the strategic part of my design life. And our real work feeds into the blog – one of our most bookmarked articles ever (All change) fed straight out of a presentation I’d done for a client who wanted to show his board that the world of identity design was changing.

Who do you think your audience is? Clients? Potential clients? Students? Designers?

I fear it’s mainly designers and students. I do point clients towards interesting thoughts that they might like, and that does have some effect – a bit like writing a ‘paper’ and publishing it for a particular audience. I have found some potential clients discussing my ‘thoughts’ in meetings too. I was mid-conversation with someone recently who referred to one of my recent thoughts as though I’d told him my view – I hadn’t, he’d just read my view. The shared collective memory fuelled our debate, but we both realised that was a slightly odd moment, a slightly spooky cyber-moment.

I guess we could try and work out who reads the blog? A reader survey flashed through my mind. Eurgh. Trouble is I don’t even know how many subscribers we have, if I’m really honest…

What, in your opinion are the qualities of a good blog?

I really like the visually driven ones. I still like Design Observer and Armin’s Speak Up/Brand New/Quipsologies empire, but they are very US focussed sometimes. There are some good up-and-coming UK blogs now too. I think it’s beginning to sink in for many that to keep a blog going you really do need to able to write, and you need to have something interesting to say. I know that sounds really obvious, but a lot of blogs suffer from 'drivel for drivel’s sake’ syndrome. I guess that why we called it thought for the week , we weren't convinced we'd have more than 52 interesting thoughts in any one year.

I’m always in two minds about the comments that people leave – I find that I need to be really bored or eating my lunch (or both) to go much further than the original post. It was interesting that Michael (Bierut) published a book of his (mainly) blog writing recently but felt no compulsion to publish any of the comments.

Sometimes the level of commentary is just terribly sycophantic on some of them – all that ‘best post ever!!!’ stuff and the ‘you slap my back, I’ll slap your technorati rating’ thing. And the negative comments that people leave become litigious too often and the general level of vitriol (not just towards our work) is quite disturbing. The savaging that Jonathan Barnbrook got on DO recently wasn’t nice. I think that’s why I’ve avoided allowing comments on our blog so far, heaven knows what people would write about us.

I think that the truly ‘first person’ blogs can work, but when they crowbar in their work and really ‘sell’ it to me I get really uncomfortable, unless the work is of a very, very high calibre. Let’s face it there aren’t many decent designers writing first-person blogs, just at the moment. Even DO gets itself into hot water when one of the principals PR’s their own projects, however well meaning it may be.

Finally, who’s blog do you subscribe to?

I have a neat little reader that collates all my RSS feeds – currently there about 60 to 70 in there I think, so they do tend to all squidge together. My current visual favourite is FFFOUND. I’m a relatively recent convert to del.icio.us, I find it fantastically useful for sorting stuff out. The rest I’m happy to graze, and I accept the fact that they are generally amateur, it doesn’t worry me too much. But I think I’m generally what in blog terms is called a ‘lurker’ – I read, but rarely comment…

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