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27.04.06
You like me, you really like me
Johnsonbanks.co.uk has just been selected (twice) for this year’s D&AD annual, which is a bonus, (although we’re obviously gutted that it wasn’t short-listed in the writing category). We thought you might be intrigued by some of the reactions to the site. Pleasetakenote.com said we were ‘cleanly presented with an intuitive interface, which resembles a mind map of sorts’ but then think ‘it drops the whole concept of the text idea a bit too quickly’ – there’s no pleasing some people is there. Designtaxi.com said ‘this methodically-chaotic kaleidoscope spreads the learned (and time-generous) passerby too thin’. That’s sort of half great, half bad, isn’t it? Brandguardians.com say ‘it’s the best ever designers website’, which is kind of them (but then we do projects together so they had to be nice). Our favourite designer friends in New York (Michael, Stephen and Stefan) said it was ‘nice’, ‘VERY nice’ and ‘a pain in the ass – I just spent 15 minutes on it when I should have been coming up with ideas for my own stuff’, in that order. A London designer colleague complained though: ‘I guess we’ve got to spend a year re-working our site now’. More feedback to come soon. Onwards to the webbies.
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11.04.06
Well done but watch out
Congratulations to Wolff Olins for winning the job to do the London Olympics – a remarkable (and to our knowledge unprecedented) achievement, having another crack at those rings so soon after doing Athens. You’ve got to admire a new business department that can swing something like that. Bit like doing the D&AD annual cover twice – it’s not really supposed to happen… But now the real work begins. With the games themselves 6 years away, we’re about to find out if an Olympic identity can be planned, designed and implemented in a coherent way that can seem ahead of its time in 2006 and ‘just right’ in 2012. If we were football managers we’d say that was a ‘big ask’. It’s the toughest of briefs. As explored already in our article ‘A plea for better Olympic graphics’ (see the Words section of this site) there are only really two viable strategies it seems for Olympic branding – design a classic system like Aicher’s 5 year marathon for Munich and stay completely focussed on the end-game. Or do a decent mark then wait and allow the graphics themselves to start with only a couple of years to go. So don’t commission that Thomas Heatherwick torch just yet guys – wait ‘til later in the decade, who knows who might be available? Mexico and LA were great because they were late, remember? Whilst we’re giving out free advice, absolutely don’t pick a typeface that seems groovy in 2006 because you know what it will feel like in 2012. Yep, 6 years out of date. You only have to look at Torino’s recent go-faster-flyer-graphics for the winter Olympics to see how quickly cool can thaw. Given that one of johnson banks was locked in a room to look at the bid logos, we can safely say that athletes jumping over big ben/running man as union jack/hands intertwined to form crown/thames as ribbon have been well and truly done to death, so that’s all out too, sorry. As we said, it’s a big ask. But our view hasn’t changed – if London is truly one of the world’s creative hubs then wouldn’t it be nice if all that creativity could be harnessed, somehow. Our ideas should be cumulative, not mutually exclusive.
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