22.12.06
Beatles stamps

Here's a sneak preview of a series of Beatles stamps johnson banks have designed for the Royal Mail, the first time they have ever featured on British stamps.

We explored many different thoughts - one idea was to let the album covers speak for themselves, and photograph them on suitably styled 60s carpets (shagpile, linoleum etc). As we prepared our album piles to stick onto carpet backgrounds, we realised we should just let the albums do the work, so the die-cut perforation simply follows the edges of the records.

We also designed a mini-sheet of stamps based on the vast array of memorabilia surrounding the band.

Both sets hit the post offices on the 9th of January.

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19.12.06
Our records of the year

Some of you may know that music is an ever-present, 11 hours a day feature of life at johnson banks. So, in the spirit of lazy end-of-the-year make a list and go home journalism, here are our records of the year, in no particular order.

Union of Knives
Violence & Birdsong

Amy Winehouse
Back to Black

Muse
Black holes and revelations

Scott Matthews
Passing stranger

Wynton Marsalis
Live at the house of tribes

Gomez
How we operate

The Flaming Lips
At War with the Mystics

The Feeling
12 Stops Then Home

Tortoise
A Lazarus Taxon

Sufjan Stevens
Illinoise & The Avalanche

Panic! At the disco
A fever you can't sweat out

Exit Music
Songs with Radio Heads

Four Tet
Remixes

Weather Report
Forecast:tomorrow

Anything by the Cinematic Orchestra

Anything by John Mayer (ok a bit MOR but hey he's a great guitarist)

Old but revived:
Plaid Double Figure, anything by Aphex Twin, weirdly The Avalanches Since I left you and Surfing with the Alien, Joe Satriani.

You'd have to describe that as an eclectic list.

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14.12.06
Ideology or policy, continued

Quite a few people have been in contact about this week's thought Ideology or Policy.

We thought we'd publish some of the feedback: Jonathan said he 'didn't think much of the Sony Ericsson ad... just a tad bored of the Ilovewhatever device' and asked 'does this mean Wolff Olins are not much cop at advertising?'

(It's worth pointing out that, as we understand it, the adverts were still carried out by an ad agency)

Tom N of E1 admittted 'I might be slightly biased (as I work for a design practice), but advertisers have let down the mobile handset industry with frankly boring advertising for some time. Say what you like about the new SE brand, at least it’s not about technology. Most adverts for new handsets feature a mobile phone suspended in a blue futuristic ‘non-space’ of light and lots of technical text about convergence – woo hoo. Until their re-brand, I don’t think I can remember a single Sony Ericsson advert. Perhaps it’s because advertisers believe branding to be static. Or perhaps they’re getting it confused with identity. Maybe it’s the negative connotations associated with the word ‘brand’.

As a contrast one very prominent ad agency creative director revealed that two years ago their pitch for Sony's main account based itself around - guess what? 'Love Sony'. He seemed understandably miffed.

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11.12.06
Ideology or policy

If you don’t study the pages of Campaign, London’s weekly advertising bible, then you’ll have missed out on a long-running and fascinating saga recently.

A few months ago, it was revealed that a piece of positioning work that Wolff Olins had been doing for Sony Ericsson had been signed off and was about to be rolled out above-the-line (ie in advertising). Only problem was, the work that had been done so enraged Sony Ericsson’s agency, BBH, they walked (or were pushed, depending on which story you listen to).

But we’re not talking about a spat over the end frame of a TV ad here, we’re talking about a £50 million ad account.

The whispers around town had it that Wolff Olins’ idea, was based loosely on the I (love) NY strategy, replacing (love) with the Sony Ericsson logo. And as the ads roll out in the media, that’s how it works – I (Sony Ericsson) travelling – I (Sony Ericsson) long journeys – you get the idea. Not world beating, but a solid piece of client-friendly thinking (the logo’s huge in the middle of the ads, for goodness sake) unfussily applied by a newly appointed agency, apparently quite happy to take the 50 mill and run with it.

Why this has ruffled so many feathers, especially in the ad world, is that here is concrete evidence that ‘branding’ has really begun to intrude in to what was once the cosy world of advertising. A world where logos stayed resolutely in the corner and were as small as the client would let you get away with. A world where the design company’s suggestions of corporate typefaces were treated with derision in the agencies because ‘only we know what type works for ads’. A world where TV ads could work almost in isolation for 27 seconds until the end-frame came up. Campaign has featured several articles discussing the implications of the Sony project, there’s been much hand wringing and thousands of words written about ‘who really creates and controls a brand’.

But anyone who’s been studying this corner of the business has seen this coming for some time. It’s no coincidence that O2 (the UK mobile phone operator) has a campaign based fairly and squarely on it’s brand identity, created by Lambie Nairn. It nearly didn’t, because the original agency was intent on ‘doing some nice ads with a logo in the corner’ until the then start-up VCCP snaffled this huge account by simply taking the brand idea of oxygen and bubbles and making it, well, the brand idea.

You can’t help thinking that some serious re-thinking is going to be needed soon needed in ad-land. For most of the last five years the larger branding projects johnson banks have carried out have begun at the highest level, with CEO’s and chairmen discussing an organisation’s future direction, but sometimes it’s been a year into the process until the discussion of ‘whether we need an ad agency’ has come up.

Sure enough, when invited to the table, the agencies sometimes do everything in their power to derail all the positioning, design and strategy that has gone before.

The shame of all this is that if design is going to begin to take the lead, it needs to understand what advertising can add to a brand, how it can build it, how powerful a medium it can be. Design has to learn when to stop, in short, and let advertising does what it does best.

But conversely advertising needs to understand that, in some people’s eyes, it has become a ‘channel’, in the way that you might choose to communicate with direct mail, or digital, or ambient, or poster, or TV, or My Space or Your Tube or Second Life or...

The ad industry seems to be struggling to come to terms with being merely a ‘channel’ and just a tactical option. But as increasingly the brand consultants control the strategy, the advertisers supply the tactics. It’s a bit like politics, in a way. A political party needs a clear ideology, then clear policies, in that order. More and more the designers help agree the ideology, then advertising helps shape policy.

The sooner the ad community works this out, the better. Because you know what policy without ideology is? Just spin.

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08.12.06
All you need is those shoes

When asked to design a poster for the new print of The Wizard of Oz, about to be released by the BFI, there was only really one option: those shoes and a yellow spiral. It's on nationwide throughout the holiday period and we can't wait to see it back on the big screen. There really is no place like home.

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05.12.06
Kate's (theoretical) logo

Whilst working recently on a hypothetical project we started to wonder what the logo for Kate Moss's upcoming Topshop range might look like. Well, they say she does get through 80 a day. If you like it Kate, give us a call...