28.01.07
The death of a style, volume 1

Want to know when a style has run its course? When it appears on an Easyjet ad in South London. That’s when.

We’re talking specifically about silhouettes here – an approach that had flurries of interest in the 70s and 80s but really took off in the late nineties.

Perhaps we were partly to blame for the revival – in the late nineties, as Aboud Sodano were preparing a beautiful set of ads for Paul Smith bags we were designing a scheme for the British Galleries at the V&A. Both featured a product as ‘hero’ and the silhouettes provided the background. Both felt of their time, suitably fin de siècle, and that, it seemed, was that.

However, perhaps fuelled by these projects, silhouettes slowly became your must-have graphic tic, probably reaching their logical summit with the iPod ads which broke a few years later. Granted, the approach was familiar but you had to admire the sheer chutzpah of the application, and the way it could jump-cut into Quicktime movies and on-line animations. From a revival of an old technique limited to fashion and culture, silhouettes suddenly had a global audience (and global levels of appropriation).

When johnson banks were developing Think London we asked ourselves a lot of questions about using the technique, but it felt appropriate and delivered the skylines in a way that seemed to work. Whilst successful as a project, it seems to have supplied a new mine of 'inspiration' for another phase of homages.

Only last week we were alerted by Dutch colleagues to this recent homage. In a funny sort of way we suppose we should be flattered. Even the recent re-branding of Macmillan Cancer Support features (yes you guessed it) the by-now obligatory image bank of silhouettes.

Now that one of Europe’s most cheapskate airlines has picked up on it, surely that is it? Once a graphic style has hit the 48 sheet posters, can it become cool again? Until enough time has passed for our collective memories to fade, probably not. Let’s put it this way, silhouettes are well and truly banned in our studio.

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26.01.07
Why kerning’s important, #2

Here are two classics submitted by Josie Evans. You could argue these are single-handedly lobbying for another section, why spelling’s important.

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22.01.07
Why kerning’s important, #1

Several years ago we were arguing with a creative director of one of London’s foremost branding agencies about how the precise letter-spacing of a logo was really letting it down.

We feel pretty strongly about this - in fact one of johnson banks’ team lived in Sydney for two years
but couldn’t visit its biggest department store
(DAVID JONES) because of the awful spacing of the A and the V of its logo.

Anyway, our friend was making the point that your average punter doesn't give two hoots about a logo’s letter-spacing (or kerning, to give it its proper name). In fact he was waiting for someone to tell him ‘why kerning’s important’. So, in his honour, here’s a new and hopefully regular feature, collecting the most terrible and tortuous examples we can find.

Number 1 was found by Julia Woollams on the Italian island of Capri. Please feel free to send us your worst.

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18.01.07
Is blogging bad for your health? Discuss

Recently we submitted our recent identity work for the BFI to a newish American ‘brand blog’, to air our work in the states and get some reaction. The piece went up and a few nice comments were duly posted. Then all hell let loose as torrents of abuse rained down from our transatlantic cousins. Now, we’ll admit that the idea of a lens flare is an unusual thought for an identity scheme (and probably sits well outside the comfort zone of what remains quite a conservative design community), but we hadn’t expected such levels of vitriol.

A few hours of self doubt followed, then a careful bit of digging revealed that, actually, the most vehement of critics hailed from unknown print shops in the deepest mid-west, or from seemingly disenchanted professionals in the outer regions of the UK. Interesting, and salutary, in a way, because in the level playing field of the blogosphere, everyone’s opinion counts and whilst some sites claim they moderate their comments, it’s actually quite rare and free speech reigns, whether you like it or not.

Of course it’s only recently that the power of blogs undermined a Daily Telegraph journalist, who, through pressure exerted online, had to admit that he had actually filed his piece on Saddam Hussein’s execution several hours (ok, the day before) in advance of the event. What might once have been standard journalistic practice is now much harder to hide. (How was he to know that Saddam would refuse to wear a hood, for heaven’s sake).

But the level of vehemence in the design blogs is not just reserved for johnson banks’ projects. Recently the venerable Design Observer posted a piece on a series of posters designs for the Yale School of Architecture. And a nice set of posters they are too.

The only snag was, the writer of the piece, William Drentell is also the publisher of a book of the posters, and the designer of the posters (Michael Bierut) is arguably Design Observer’s chief editor. Gentle appreciation duly flowed, but then it all went pear-shaped as several of New York’s seemingly ever-online bloggers let rip at the article, effectively accusing the Design Observer founders of blatant self promotion. Sure enough the whole design community pitched in and within a matter of days a simple piece on some nice black and white posters seemed to have ballooned out of control and picked uncomfortably at issues of objectivity, publishing and self-promotion in the largely structure-less cyber-world we now inhabit.

Of course, most of you reading this hadn’t tracked these examples, and why should you? You probably have better things to do with your lives than read blogs, let alone the design-related ones. But we wonder if, when a few electronic messages have the power to embarrass design principals on either side of the Atlantic and get journalists nearly fired, we might be watching the blogs more closely in the future.

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13.01.07
A killer app for the Olympics

Slightly early for a meeting in Spitalfields recently we found this fantastic sports bag dating from the 1972 Munich Olympics. You've just got to admire that design restraint - a white bag, the rings and two pieces of type. Can the Olympics get any cooler than that?

(We wrote about designing for the Olympics elsewhere in this site - follow this link to read more.)

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11.01.07
A fan you might actually use

This is a new project currently being exhibited and sold in Tokyo.

Your average young Tokyo-ite is more and more aware of global warming, and as a consequence Japanese offices have set their air conditioners to kick in at 28 degrees. So the Creation Gallery in Ginza thought it would be interesting to ask designers to try and re-invent the everyday fan for the 21st century.

We liked the idea of using the 'cool' colours from a swatch. If you'd like one, we've placed an order and should have a couple of dozen soon.

Follow this link to see some of the other fans in the exhibition.

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09.01.07
A brief flurry of excitement

It's all very well designing stamps but the truth is, the lead times are incredibly long. So popping off to the post office to buy these was actually quite exciting (honest). The project itself started 20 months ago (that's a long time to wait to put a perforated sticker on your finger). We know we're not objective but we reckon they look pretty good on those sheets.

You can read more about the stamps here.

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03.01.07
Our sincere apologies

Over the years we've become slightly obsessed with the post, and one thing that's fascinated us for some time are those strange plastic bags that faulty mail gets delivered inside.

We finally got around to using this idea for our recent xmas card - at face value it seemed to be another of these apologetic plastic wallets. On opening, our poor victims discovered a whole series of 'bits' of great stuff, some real, some imagined, but no actual presents at all. No johnson banks branding, just a phone number (which rang off the hook for three days, mainly with irate men wondering where their viagra delivery was).

Very amusing. As it said in the small print, it's the thought that counts.