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26.10.07
The running man
If you have an idle moment it’s worth looking at ‘Gert R’s’ photo blog. It’s a simple idea - balance a camera on a stable surface, set the timer for 2 seconds and then run like hell. Brilliant. 
Found here.
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25.10.07
Bad memory lane
Rummaging about on my home bookshelves recently I came across this 20 year old tome, The Best of British Corporate Design.
I was really searching to find this logo that was designed by Michael Peters & Partners for the V&A’s trading arm at the same time as Alan Fletcher’s now seminal mark. 
I wanted to show another gallery that ‘trading identities’ were inherently confusing ideas and this still remains the best example – a nice idea in itself, albeit at a time when everyone seemed to have upside/downside logos, but one destined to fight a losing battle against a classic.
Leafing through this (suspiciously un-thumbed) book teleports me back to a period of 80s British design that often makes me cringe. At the time, only a couple of years out of college, this work was going on around me and much of it seemed vital, exciting even. And maybe it will again, in another twenty years. Trouble is, just at the moment, whilst I appreciate that this
and this
seemed new at the time, you only have to leaf through another few pages to discover that the brushstroke/torn paper/Matisse vernacular had replaced magic markers as the style of choice across town. Here are some good examples...
See what I mean about cringing? The book itself was part of a series produced by Minale Tattersfield on ‘The best of British...’ and indeed contains a suspiciously generous amount of their projects. To anyone who knew Marcello Minale, this comes as no surprise - he would have treated the book as much as PR for himself as for British Design. Just one phone call to the book’s actual designer confirmed what I’d suspected for years – a generation of designers then frustrated by eighties award schemes’ disinterest in their paper collages had inadvertedly spawned this strange beast. There are great stories of Peter Saville and Jay Smith (of 80s darlings Smith and Milton) having a huge bust-up after he called one of their seminal schemes ‘wine bar graphics’ (ouch), and Marcello returning from D&AD juries complaining about ‘that bloody Mary Lewis’, Lewis’ beautifully crafted thoughts having ousted his clunkier ‘big ideas’ from design’s top table. But maybe these kind of books are useful, just as good reminders? They remind us that ribbons for Olympics are hardly new, nor are multi coloured lines making Manchester’s ‘M’. 
They remind us that this often publicised mock-up for the Museum of Modern Art Oxford never actually existed as real banners.
They remind us of the goldfish that was once Bovis’s symbol before the hummingbird won out, that became Addison’s, and then became Goldfish (the credit card) a decade later.
They remind me that I never, ever, want to see a wine shop identity that looks like this ever again.
Of course not all of it is dreadful. I still don’t really understand this scheme for British Rail freight but boy it looks great on those trains.
The Minale’s scheme below for a company comprising eight companies and eight brothers still looks pretty strong.
In fact the old British Telecom scheme looks, well, kind of groovy, doesn’t it?
It’s got Web 2.0 rounded type. It’s got ranged left Helvetica. Isn’t yellow coming back into fashion? Hang on a sec, maybe there’s something to be said for this book after all…
By Michael Johnson
The Best of British Corporate Design, designed by Minale Tattersfield, was published in 1989 by Booth-Clibborn Editions. If you’re desperate you'll get one on Abe for about 15 dollars
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23.10.07
Fast, good or cheap?
I first came across this phrase about 15 years ago as I struggled to explain to a roomful of serious looking ad-men that whilst I was young, relatively inexperienced, had (in retrospect) over-long hair and worked off a borrowed table with a borrowed Mac, if they chose me to design their brochure I would take my time, it wouldn’t be cheap but it would be a damn fine brochure.
‘Oh’, piped up one of the suits ‘so you’re saying it’s fast, good or cheap, pick any two?’ And at that moment I was introduced to a phrase that would drop neatly into countless conversations ever since.
For most designers, their clients sit across the table and do their darndest to get the project done really quick, really well and for as little as possible. And of course we’ve all been suckered into that, duly done everything at light speed and felt more than a little short-changed at the end. But of the beauty of fast, good or cheap is that it forces the client to think about the transaction that’s taking place. ‘If you want it fast and good, well you’ll have to pay more’. Or ‘of course it will be great, and yes we can do it for your budget, but you’ll have to give us more time’. And I suppose this is technically possible too: ‘well if you insist we’ll do it quickly and cheaply (but it will be useless)’.
It has regularly dropped into conversations over the course of johnson banks’ life because of our weakness for cultural/ethical/charity projects, a sector notoriously underfunded. Any conversational gambits that can extend the length of time on these projects will help enormously.
But it’s not just to do with the money – it’s also the need for a decent gestation period. Some ideas just don’t come in a flash, they come after months and months of discussion, analysis and head scratching. (In fact some of our clients might say that ‘slow, expensive but good’ was a better way of describing how we work).
We’d thought from the beginning of our project for Save the Children that loosening up their house-style would help them, but it wasn’t until we were four or five months in that we chanced on the idea of getting children to draw their typefaces for them. 
It was only after our ‘traditional’ brochure for Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the V&A had been rejected that we gambled and suggested to them that they stop doing a brochure and send a paper sculpture instead.
But over the two decades that I’ve been using this phrase, it seems to have grown-up. I discovered recently that it has a proper name: The Project Management Triangle, no less. Or (and I like this one) The tyranny of OR (as in fast and good OR good and cheap OR fast and cheap).
You can visit websites that have neatly animated push-me-pull-you diagrams that show you how it works. It has its own flickr page. I’ve found that in Maupin’s Tales from the City, Mona’s law says ‘You can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can’t have all three at the same time.’ You can apply it to real life if you switch the words to ‘Work, sleep or play, pick two’. It mutates into other languages – Bueno, Bonito y Barato (that’s ‘good, pretty and cheap’)
Conversely, some people seem to be lobbying for all three, recently dubbed ‘The genius of the AND’ (as in fast AND good AND cheap). Current record-sleeve design darlings, Non-Format, recently admitted that their modus operandi was ‘we end up doing it all quickly, well and for no money’ which was probably a phrase that had their accountant shaking slightly. 
Because it’s a three-way, rather than two-way decision (a trilemma rather than a dilemma), or to be more precise, a two-out-of-three-lemma, it will probably always appeal as a verbal triptych. And whilst it’s a conversational gambit that can only be used once (and with the right kind of client) it remains one of the fastest ways I know to make people stop and value what we do just a little bit more.
By Michael Johnson Thanks to roadorama for the top pic
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19.10.07
Greener listening
The design company Thoughtful have (thoughtfully) posted audio and visual versions of five of the talks given by speakers at the recent Applied Green conference. You can watch David Hieatt’s (from Howies) and listen to the talks given by Russell Davies, Eugenie Harvey, John Grant and johnson banks’ Michael Johnson. Slightly surreal, to listen to a talk rather than watch it, but intriguing all the same (and a lot cheaper than shelling out for the conference itself).
The full text and slides of Michael’s talk are here.
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16.10.07
The eyes and ears of the world
A British design magazine recently asked me to suggest one of my favourite logos. The Time Warner symbol from the early nineties by Chermayeff & Geismar is my nomination.
It was developed as a visual solution for the merger of Time Inc and Warner Communications, and neatly ties into a desire to be ‘the eyes and ears of the world’. Any decent identity designer will confirm that having a good idea is one thing, but a useful sentence like that supplies fantastic boardroom rationale as you unveil the preferred solution.
The logo itself looks beautifully simple, but study it carefully and you’ll see it’s not really geometric, and actually quite organic. It’s one of those ideas that we’ve all scribbled into our notebooks, only to come quickly unstuck trying to create in real life. 
If my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, I think I remember reading that its designer, Steff Geissbuhler (now of C&G partners) had been struggling to get the curves to work on a computer and ended up painting the solution at home with a set of big fat paintbrushes. Try creating something like this with a standard drawing programme and you’ll soon begin to appreciate how much time Geissbuhler and his team would have spent balancing the weights of the lines which are often technically ‘wrong’ but look visually so right.
As the overall organisation’s mnemonic it was sadly short-lived because a boardroom re-shuffle removed its main supporters and it ended up being shunted over to the cable division. This was justified at the time because ‘the symbol is so strong, it’s hard to make it work with the other symbols’. Quite rightly, the US design fraternity threw up it hands in protest (albeit to no avail). I’ve always thought that was an inherently paradoxical criticism, that a logo could be too strong.
Thankfully it’s had enough time in the public domain to become a late 20th century classic, and the phrase ‘I wish I’d done that’ doesn’t even begin to cover it for me. If I ever get my eyes to see or hear a solution as good as that I’ll die happy.
Michael Johnson This is a an adaptation of a recent piece for the imminent edition of Grafik magazine
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12.10.07
Unbound
Johnson banks has just finished the initial stages of an identity for the US-based philanthropic trust Unbound. We wanted to find a way to express who they supported - they largely give grants to charities that help people find their own way out of difficulty, effectively organisations that believe in self-determination. We struggled a little to symbolise this until we used the words they use to describe their work to form a logotype. After some experimentation, we found that we could write the word Unbound using 59 separate words. 
We’ve developed this into a headline typeface 
and numerals
For applications we’re mixing angles, words and a restricted colour palette, and using bias cut edges on report covers and stationery.
We’re also using the typographic language to build a family of symbols they can use for print, web and presentations. 
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08.10.07
Copyright, bunnies and the public domain
Last week saw the launch of the latest Sony Bravia ad, further exploring the idea of ‘colour like no other’. After balls bouncing through San Francisco and paint-filled pyrotechnics on a Scottish housing estate, we’ve now got animated bunnies stop-framing their way through New York, which then turn into a wave which turns back into a bunny, and so on…
Like its predecessors, it will easily stand up to repeat viewing and is a technical tour-de-force that will probably clean up in the end-of-year gong-fests.
But only days after its launch it seems the idea is perhaps not quite as unique as it first seems. LA based artists kozyndan (as in Kozy and Dan) who have spent much of their careers riffing on, er, bunnies, think the ad is a little too close to comfort. This has annoyed the production company so much it’s now issuing flat denials.
The suggestion that an ad is similar to something else is of course not new. Anyone who has seen Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Wings of Desire will be starting to lose count of how many times his ideas have been ‘recycled’ in the name of popular consumption.
And it’s not so long since the creative community fell in love with an ad for Honda that investigated the idea of perpetual motion... 
...only to discover it was directly ‘inspired’ by The way things go, a film by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. 
The difficulty with these cases is ascertaining whether something is the same idea that just happened to crop up twice, a well-meaning homage, or a blatant rip-off.
Paula Scher always admitted that her famous Swatch poster was a deliberate nod to Herbert Matter’s iconic poster (but rumour has it that it stopped her being admitted to a famous design body for years because the Swiss board of grandees couldn’t forgive her).
When we presented this idea to Yellow Pages in the nineties for a set of yellow covers (featuring yellow objects) it struck us as a pretty obvious idea, and it ran quite happily for five or six years.
After it launched, it transpired that a previous agency had once presented a cover that never went through that included rubber ducks. Given that we hadn’t been rummaging around under our clients desk for old bits of polyboard, we had never seen it, but we took it seriously enough to check with our lawyers.
Their advice was pretty clear – in this case the ‘idea’ of a rubber duck for Yellow Pages, was inherently unprotectable. That’s one of the oddities of copyright law – pure ideas, per se, can’t be protected. On first reading this can make those of us who trade in ideas a little nervous. But hang on, it gets better. Whilst an idea can’t be protected, the way that idea is carried out can be.
So, sticking with yellow objects, the idea of a banana skin (which we of course presented many times to no avail) cannot be ring-fenced. But the way we might have photographed it - with amped-up yellow photos next to vertical type - could have been.
It often comes down to registration and the issue of the public domain. To translate the lawyer-speak, there are ways to register designs, and in case of conflict it can be an issue if a design has been seen by the general public or not.
So, if you’re designing a logo at the moment that feels a bit familiar, hunt about in the books to check first, then contact a trademark agency to carry out a visual search second. We take this seriously enough now to regularly carry out trademark checks before we show ideas to clients to avoid any potential issues further down the line. Yes, it’s expensive, but cheaper in the long run if something comes out of the woodwork.
This kind of due diligence should make ideas bullet-proof, but things can sometimes sneak through. Our design of a flock of 15 swans for the UK Presidency of Europe (representing the 15 member states) passed all the legal checks but on the day of launch an ultra-right wing anti-Europe think tank claimed the government had stolen their flock of geese. 
It transpired that they’d never registered the design, and the last time it had been seen was on a leaflet 14 years previously, but still, it was enough to grab a few pointing scoring headlines. Had it gone further, their complaint would have fallen over a) because they hadn’t protected it and b) fringe meetings of 30 people at party conferences doesn’t count as public domain. And the sheer passage of time can also count against a claim, especially if no longer used, because the rights erode if an idea isn’t being used. Luckily none of the johnson banks team had been teenage right-wing activists with photographic memories. Phew.
Sometimes copyright issues can reach a fairly surreal point. We once contacted the artist Gillian Wearing to see if she wanted to collaborate on a project. We’d always enjoyed her fantastic Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say project where she asked random people to write something on a piece of paper and hold it up.
We wanted to see if she was interested in taking it further for a government project, but she refused, so we changed tack and found a different solution that didn’t infringe her idea. Wearing’s project is an unusual one, because her idea is itself similar to at least two previous expositions. Maxell famously ran ads for their recording tape that suggested ridiculous lyrics for famous songs (most memorably Desmond Dekker’s The Israelites). This idea was itself based on a famous film shot to accompany Bob Dylan’s iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues, where Dylan laconically held up the lyrics to the song. So to anyone with even a passing interest in popular culture, Wearing’s idea was beautifully done, but had its own set of precedents that, crucially, had been seen by millions of people. 
Not long after we’d contacted Wearing, an ad agency waded straight in and filmed a blatant rip-off for Volkswagen featuring everyday people holding up cards with whatever was on their mind at that time. True to advertising cliché one woman held a card that said ‘sex and chocolate’. Ho ho. Wearing was understandably miffed but would have realized pretty quick that going to court would have a been a 30 grand gamble. Any decent defence lawyer would have dug out Maxell and Dylan, and that could well have been game over.
So where does that place our bunny lovers, kozyndan?
The fact they have indulged in homages of their own (such as this admittedly hilarious adaptation of Hokusai’s classic great wave) doesn’t help, but Hokusai’s classic dates from the first half of the 19th century, and is ingrained in the world’s collective visual memory banks. 
Basing your work on bunnies doesn’t mean that you inherently own the right to any artwork involving our furry friends. (Incidentally, copyright inherently runs out after 50 years, so the cynical amongst you reading this could legitimately play fast and loose with a whole host of classic designs from the early fifties and no-one could do much about it).
It gets stickier though, when you see this panorama that Kozyndan produced in 2002, which featuring coloured bunnies wandering about in an urban landscape spookily similar to New York. 
Stickier still when it transpires the film’s production company asked to see their work a year ago then never took it further, although this is now being strongly denied. So to return to our banana skin example, you can’t copyright the idea of bunnies in a city. But you can copyright small brightly coloured bunnies jumping about in a monotone New York landscape. You could also argue that they owned the idea of bunnies turning into a wave, give that the Hokusai is now over 150 years old.
In our view, kozyndan have a pretty strong case. Our advice to the agency would have been simple – involve the artists from the outset (as they may have intended to do), make the connection clear and above board, give them a cut. If something’s a homage, own up to it. As it stands, we’re now being led to believe that the agency and the production company dreamt up the idea in some sort of parallel universe to kozyndan with no knowledge of any of the artists work. Now you can understand that two agencies might both think of yellow rubber ducks for a client called Yellow Pages, but it seems less likely with small coloured bunnies milling about in Manhattan. One good thing comes out of all of this. At one time, the easy option was to produce ideas that were a little bit familiar, a bit safe, because no-one would get particularly offended. But now it’s easier to protect your work, and easier to air your grievances in cyber-space, it will force agencies and their clients to search for more original ideas. Not to cynically steal other people’s whilst hoping no-one notices.
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04.10.07
Leaching it of any meaning
The following is an adaptation of a speech given yesterday at The Applied Green conference by Michael Johnson. 
On paper at least, I seem pretty green.
I get the Guardian twice a day (at home and at work). We recycle like crazy. I’m a vegetarian. Hey, I even own two pairs of sandals, for goodness sake.
When I think about getting my own house in order, I can see my boiler is way too old and needs to go. I’m scoping my south-facing roof to see if I can fit in the solar panels. Like most of us, when I go round with a camera, I’m appalled at quite how many energy-guzzling gadgets family Johnson owns. (But I’m not sure I’ll ever persuade my son to switch to a clockwork guitar amp). 
If I was giving myself a green mark I guess I’d get D-minus. Could try harder.
As a company, johnson banks has at least dabbled in green issues. Some years ago we produced a series of images for the Design Council about sustainable issues – this one future-gazed what all those landfill nappies might look like, fossilised, in a 61st century museum case.
We’ve taken the obligatory pop at an American president. This poster suggested that the hole in the ozone layer has actually settled over the precise spot where Dubya’s brain once was.
We’ve designed eco-friendly canvas bags and air-conditioning beating fans for the Japanese market. A couple of years ago we designed this global warming symbol for a biennale in Lisbon, and now offer it as freeware for anyone who wants it (as long as they don’t use it for commercial gain).
I guess that’s a B minus?
My eco-tipping point...
It came this summer. We merrily set off to our favourite Balearic island. When we got there, we discovered that we ran a serious risk of jellyfish stings due to an infestation throughout the mediterranean. Only about halfway through the holiday (one spent mainly on jellyfish watch) did one of the locals explain exactly why the problem was so bad. It seems that the sea has warmed up so much, the turtles that normally lunch on the jellyfish have moved to cooler climes. Or the ones that stayed couldn’t differentiate between jellyfish and plastic bags, which killed them slowly and painfully by sticking in their guts. Hence the infestation. Hence the (now inevitable) stings.
At that moment it dawned – by flying consistently to my idyll over a 15 year period, I’d pumped many tons of carbon into the atmosphere and warmed the sea. I’ve probably inadvertently created litter. In a way, I caused my daughter’s stings.
Now of course, I’m thinking hard about every flight that I’m asked to make. I’ve been asked to talk in Portugal next year. That’s a two-hour plane flight, normally a no-brainer and a nice weekend in Porto, thanks very much. But approach it a different way (and it involves seven different trains) and I can get there using 22.8% of the carbon. (Only snag is that it takes a day and a half to get there). 
So what can design do? If we’d discussed this before the summer, we would have bemoaned the fact that you could only choose from a handful of green cars. But this year’s Frankfurt motor show was crammed to the bumpers with green/eco/hybrid options, including an interesting diesel/hybrid proposal from Citroen that will have seriously low emissions. After a slow start, Volkswagen have announced hybrids across their range, and British supercar designer Gordon Murray is now devoting his time to building a super mini that can be assembled in the UK (hence cutting down on planet unfriendly shipping).
In fashion, designers are investigating how materials can be recycled, like these great shoes made from old bicycle tyres.
There are proposals in cyber space for re-using dead fluorescents as lampshades.  And this charming concept for a wind-up bedside light. 
How about this wonderful beach toy that encourages children to collect the Octopus’s legs on the beach (neatly cleaning up the beach in the process)?
And Ross Lovegrove recently unveiled this amazing proposal for solar powered tree lights.
But what about graphic design? I wish I could report that it was doing its bit. Trouble is, tap “sustainable graphic design” into Google and you get a thousand suggested links. But tap “Helvetica Movie” in, and guess what, you get fifteen thousand. So in cyberspace at least, that makes people 15 times as interested in a movie about a typeface than how to design responsibly. Great.
Some people are at least trying. Thomas Matthews and Thoughtful have stated their ethical policies publicly. Airside have gone carbon neutral and been awarded a ‘green mark’ accordingly. Only a few weeks ago, Design can change launched in the USA, trying to persuade the vast army of American designers to look harder at what they do, and to amend their ways accordingly.
Tour your local supermarket, and you’ll start to see some changes. You can now buy this i-count dessert that suggests that saving the planet is only a spoonful of caramel yogurt away. 
On your tour, you’ll also see lovely packs like these for organic products (in fact you’ll see a lot of organic products).
Examine these packs a bit harder and you’ll realise that a serious amount of food miles have been spent getting them to your shelves. And, no, you can’t recycle the packaging either (well, at least not the ones I picked up). Makes you wonder just how green, being organic really is.
There is some help out there though. Go to the WRAP website and there’s a whole load of advice for packaging designers on how to change their ways. After studying this site for ten minutes I set about a defenceless packet of Quorn in my fridge with a pair of scissors.
Here’s what it looks like, normally.
Now, if they just had a label (and screened the mandatory on the back)… 
…I can immediately save them about 70% of their paper costs.
If I screen the info on the film, we save even more.
Trouble is, put the before and after side by side and most packaging designers (and their clients) would start screaming ‘where’s the appetite appeal’ at me, and they’d have a point. 
In the current climate, reduced packaging equals cheaper packaging, which often equals less sales. Mies van der Rohe may have preached less is more, but I suspect too many British shoppers are closet post-modernists and would adhere more closely to Venturi’s maxim, less is a bore.
Until ‘less’ can be re-defined and revalued, this remains a tough one to crack. There are production line issues too, even when designers are trying to do the right thing. These clever little USB-powered re-chargeable batteries are pretty sustainable, when you think about it, but the packaging designers found that the blister pack manufacturers couldn’t use recycled board when they finalised the pack. So a sustainable product goes to market in an unsustained way. (But at least they tried).
What can branding do?
This would be an easier question to answer if it weren’t for the relentless stream of greenwash that we’re now subjected to.
The proud grand-daddies of corporate greenwash have to be British Petroleum, sorry I mean Beyond Petroleum, who still derive the vast amount of their profits from good old fashioned messy energy but hope that their green flower logo and some wind turbines on their petrol stations will make us think differently of them. 
We’ve been trying to find out for weeks just how much power the turbine at my local station actually creates, but we’re yet to get a straight answer. Well, any answer at all actually.
On any day, in any British newspaper, you’re faced with superb paradoxes. You’ll be asked to choose a more efficient car, but informed about cheap flights in the same breath.
You’ll see an airline (Easyjet) attempting to take the moral high ground on green flying (now there’s a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one).
You might spot Quantas suggesting that you can fly with them, carbon neutrally. Trouble is, ring up and ask about this, and you’ll get met with abject confusion. This is a transcript of a conversation we had with a Quantas rep only last week.
The whole subject is chaotic, jumbled and confused Look at all the people trying to stake a space in the green marketplace. 
Even the language of carbon is confusing.
I can’t make head or tail of some of these ads. Who is the Energy Saving Trust? Why should I care about Lancresse Rangers?
Organisations are so keen to embrace the climate change debate that they are stumbling over themselves. One of our clients, Christian Aid, has moved from talking about tricky stuff like Trade Justice and Dropping the debt to more current issues like cutting carbon. But trade injustice hasn’t gone away, it just got less sexy.
Even the machinery to help you calculate your footprint can be misleading. This experiment by the RSA has to be applauded, but its calculator suggested to one designer in our studio (who had been on several short breaks already this year) that she still had enough credit to fly a little bit more. Er, no, not really. 
And can anyone tell me what possible relevance the fact that each packet of Walkers involves 75g of carbon has to the average crisp muncher?
The classic area of misinformation, of course, is carbon offsetting. This is a rapidly growing business that suggests that rather than actually change your lifestyle, you can offset the carbon damage instead.
The glamour stock of carbon offsetting is Climate Care. After just a few calculations, having really amped up my family’s footprint to include everything I could think of, they suggest that all I really need to do is give them 93 British pounds and everything will be tickety-boo again. Guilt over.
(Oh and by the way they’d only use 56% of that on actual projects). Of course, yes, where do I sign? 
I haven’t really got the space here to really unpick carbon offsetting, but as George Monbiot has suggested, the parallels to papal indulgences are pretty strong (ie ‘pay me dosh and we’ll forget your sins’). Interestingly it seems that the Vatican has declared itself carbon neutral (by offsetting, naturally). It seems indulgences are still with us.
It’s really hard to get the facts
We’ve spent the summer with our heads in the climate change books, and it’s only when you lift your head up that you start to realise there’s a vast amount of untold stories and disinformation out there. We thought we’d take time to illustrate some of the things we’ve found out.
For example, did you know, on average, every glass of orange juice you pour out at breakfast has required 2 glasses of diesel fuel to get there?
And just to put flying and shipping food into sharper focus…
We’ve found it helps us to use the analogy of the boiling kettle. So Kuala Lumpur return has the same carbon implications of leaving your kettle on for 152 days, solidly.
And whilst we’re all for the ‘ban plastic bags’ debate, let’s put it into perspective. On average each person uses between 60 and 200 plastic bags a year. Fly to Australia and back for Christmas and you’re making the same climate impact as 730,000 of the things. 
At last, some clarity
The wading that we’ve done finally got us to something genuinely useful. These two documents, released by the IPPR, meticulously track the language of climate change. 
Last year’s document makes fascinating reading – in summary it suggested that climate change language (then) was centred on ‘alarmism’ (as in oh my god we’re all gonna die) or ‘mundane small actions’ (as in turn off your phone charger and you’ll save the planet).
But the most recent, only published a few weeks ago, recognises a significant shift. It suggests that consensus has been reached. That a point has been tipped. That most people (even George Bush) now accept that climate change is real.
It concludes that to go forward, we must capitalise on the heightened awareness. We must make it easy for the public to do something, harness communities and use all possible ways do it.
So, if we were re-communicating climate change,
what would we do?
As far as I can see, there are three main questions.
Initially, the most powerful route would seem to be the alarmist one. And one of the most powerful routes within this seems to be to persuade adults now that it’s their actions that will affect their children’s future. A sort of you’re alright jack, but what about the kids approach.
It’s about persuading those touch-line dads who brag about weeks spent jetting around in business class to stop it and video-conference instead. It’s about making them feel guilty about consigning their future grandchildren to a life lived in a desert. 
Or imagining what kind of will we will be writing for our children…
Or (taking it to a logical conclusion), every plane ticket you buy will drown someone.
(It’s worth pointing out at this point that these are communication thoughts and prompts – they’re not meant to be finalised ideas, not yet).
Maybe shocking people into action is too extreme – perhaps we should just suggest that people take a minute to think about their actions.
Certainly what Warm Words II suggests is that we should use inclusive, encouraging language. So words like we can do something, together we can fix it, join us. Words that encourage collective action, collective positive action.
If you look at what’s happening in the media, people are starting to take on board advice about a greener lifestyle. Even The Sun is running supplements on going green – now that wouldn’t have happened a year ago.
There’s a rise of collective movements like Manchester is my planet, or the town that got together to ban plastic bags altogether. Or the newly launched Green Thing. 
You could argue that this kind of approach could work. An approach that could be ‘agit’ if you wanted to slap stickers on Hummers…
…or encourage collective, positive action.
Perhaps you could go one step further and make everyone feel that they were helping the planet. Good old terra firma gets mended by the terrafixers, if you like.
Now some of these thoughts may be overstated, and none of them are meant to be run tomorrow. But by bashing these ideas together using the language of advertising and design, we’re just trying to show that something, at a mass communication level could be done. And it could be very powerful. People’s behaviour could be changed.
As Warm Words II notes, ‘Even though the mainstream media has changed the way it reports climate change, there are few signs that this has filtered through sufficiently to stimulate the public to act. And that is the challenge ahead’. In other words, whatever we do must both persuade people and get them to do something.
There’s a bigger but (from the same source).
‘We might be at a tipping point, where climate-friendly actions become normal and we move towards a culture of environmental responsibility. Conversely, climate change could become yesterday’s issue, with greenwash leaching it of all meaning’. Now that’s a salutary thought. Just as the public reach the point of acceptance, all that goodwill could be shattered by over-zealous ad agencies running a bunch of ‘green ads’ just to hop on a bandwagon. Please, someone, stop them, A few words of thanks – to the johnson banks staff and Johnson family who’ve become part of this project over the last few months, and my external sounding boards who’ve helped with structure and content. If you want us to go into this in more detail with us, please contact us. If you want to read more then start with George Monbiot’s bestseller, ‘Heat’.
The images for these slides were drawn from a myriad different sources – we’ve tried to link to as many as we can, but please bear with us if you feel we’ve endangered your copyright. It was for a good reason.
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02.10.07
Applied green
Johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson, will be speaking tomorrow at Applied Green, a Haymarket conference at The British Library. This is being billed as ‘a festival of minds where the biggest names will tackle the biggest issue we face - the impact of green issues on conventional business and mindsets’. It is, unfortunately, a vast amount of money for a ticket (which strikes us as pretty un-green) but we will be posting our thoughts later this week (which will be free). A full list of speakers is below. Greg Nugent, managing director, Eurostar
Jonathan Porritt, founder director, Forum For The Future
David Hieatt, founder of Howies.
Philip Gould, Philip Gould Associates
John Grant, co-founder of St Luke's
Michael Bremans, chief executive, Ecover
Eugenie Harvey, founder of We Are What We Do
Adam Morgan, partner, eatbigfish
Naresh Ramchandani, Karmarama founder and Guardian columnist
Ben Terrett, The Design Conspiracy
Michael Johnson, johnson banks
Marc Sands, marketing director,The Guardian
Matthew Anderson, BSkyB
Russell Davies, Open Intelligence Agency
Dr Arlo Brady, special advisor, Freud Communications
Steve Howard, chief executive, The Climate Group
Arlo Brady, Freud Communications
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01.10.07
Using up the address labels
One of the issues of re-branding large charities (as we’ve been doing the last few years) is the amount of ‘old stationery’ left in the cupboard as a result.
Judging by this parcel we received from Christian Aid last week, they’ve found a rather neat way of getting around this problem. The old and new logos are shown below. Clever. 
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