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28.11.07
1000 frames of Hitchcock
If you have an idle moment, marvel at the delights of this, dedicated to distilling Hitchcock movies down to 1000 frames in length. Above, excerpts from North by Northwest, below, Vertigo. 
Found via Coudal.
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27.11.07
The Design Grotto
Johnson banks will be taking part in The Design Grotto in the Portico Rooms at Somerset House on the middle weekend of December. A whole host of designers and artists will have stalls and hold workshops, including Tatty Devine and Mark Pawson. We haven’t really decided what we’ll be selling yet, but our working title is Postability, which leaves it nice and open to sell things you can post, or posters. Or both? Looks like it will be fun - it’s free and times rather neatly with the marvellous ice rink at Somerset House, so if you get bored of the designer stuff you can go practice your triple salkos. There is a set of charity postcards by the contributors to mark the event, based on the theme of ‘All I want for Christmas is You’. Here’s ours. 
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24.11.07
The wrong kind of benchmark?
There’s a newish award scheme in the UK which is run by Design Week called The Benchmarks which is now in its third year. It announced the shortlisted work a few weeks ago and will have its awards dinner this Tuesday night at the Waldorf in London. We were pleased to have a few things shortlisted (our identities for The Art Fund, the BFI and this year’s Christian Aid Week campaign) but something about the publicised shortlist set a few alarm bells off. Maybe it was this work for The National Bingo? 
Maybe it was these packs for Dylon?
Maybe we were worried that this shortlisted project was, well, still under construction? 
All in all we got the feeling that it wasn’t going to be our year, so no dinner tickets were purchased, we put our heads down and forgot all about it. A chance visit to the johnson banks headquarters today (Saturday) revealed, on the doormat, the Benchmarks 2007 results book. That’s odd, we thought, casually flicking through the book that revealed that our hunch was indeed correct, and confirmed our commendedness and closeness but no actual cigars. This strikes us as an odd precedent to set, mailing out the awards results before the event? Maybe the awards night was brought forward and no-one told us? Or were we sent it by a Design Week mole? Or (as seems more likely) have the mailing house sent the results out a week too early? In the interests of fair play we won’t reprint all the results, that would make Tuesday night seem a bit of an anticlimax. Mind you at least you can now pre-order the celebratory champagne (or not, as the case may be). And luckily there’s still a few days to finish that website.
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23.11.07
Another remixed billboard
Simon from Switzerland has just sent us another remixed billboard which is at a petrol station on the motorway between Geneva and Lausanne. He suspects it may be a statement about the changeover talking place in the typography used for the road signage - apparently they’re going from ‘Normalschrift für Signale’ (a bit like DIN) to a reworked Frutiger 57 called ‘Frutiger Astra’. In case you missed it we reported on a whole series of remixed billboards in India in this post. All seems very un-swiss, to us, but very beautiful, all the same.
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22.11.07
Less is more
You probably have a copy of Phaidon’s The Art Book on your shelves. Somehow they managed to cram 500 pages of great art into a book and then sell it for 20 quid.
Recently publishers seem to have discovered a new twist on this – big books, but in small editions. Rather than ‘print a million, sell ’em cheap’, this is ‘print as few as we can, as big as we can and charge as much as possible’.
Only a few years ago, Taschen, keen to show they weren’t just budget purveyors of soft porn, produced Helmut Newton’s Sumo, so heavy it needed a Starck designed table just to hold it. The coffee table book became the coffee table itself (but watch you don’t spill your cappuccino). Just a quick check on Abebooks.com reveals copies starting at $12,000.
Even art books of a few thousand copies now command significant prices. Damien Hirst’s 1997 collaboration with Jonathan Barnbrook (I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere…) will set you back about $3,500 for a signed copy (this is for a book that started at £70). Little wonder that Barnbrook himself wishes he had more than 2 copies. 
The variation on the big=beautiful theme is the availability of differently priced editions. You can buy ‘basic’ editions for a few hundred rising to several thousand for the signed edition with a piece of the artists hair sellotaped to the end papers. Ok, I’m joking, but only a little. This up and coming 42cm high, 756 page tome on New York, is available in ‘basic’ edition of 500 @ £1,250, rising to £6,000 for the ‘Columbus’ edition of just 100 copies. 
These are books destined to say as much about their owners as the books themselves (you’ll need a big apartment to show them off, after all). But if you’re considering investing, check the numbers first. There were 10,000 copies of Sumo printed – that’s not very limited, is it? OK, they sold for £6000 each, and resell for upwards of $12,000 but anyone with their eye on exchange rates will know that’s not such a great investment. If you’re interested in books as investments, there are other, much smarter ways to do it. A full set of D&AD Annuals is rumoured to be worth thirty grand. A copy of Mise en Page (thought by many to be the first ever book on graphic design, from 1931) is worth over $4,000. 
The historic Fleuron series from the twenties? $4,500. 
Back copies of Eye are going for £100, so imagine what a full set would be worth (they are currently on issue 65). Old copies of seminal type journal Typographica regularly go for £150 each, so if you find both series of sixteen in your local junk shop, smile sweetly at the assistant, offer him £100 cash for the lot and get out as quick as you can. 
But if you’re looking for a serious front room talking point, maybe these big, new books are for you, or maybe they make the perfect present? Just don’t assume that big equals collectible.
This is an adaptation of a recent article for Design Week by Michael Johnson
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19.11.07
Questions answered on The Serif
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. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 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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16.11.07
15 (again)
We’re a little bleary today due to a small gathering we had last night celebrating 15 years of johnson banks, which started in autumn 1992. The invite to the party featured images of the johnson banks staff aged 15 (hence the party theme, 15 again). Here are Michael Johnson, Julia Woollams, Kath Tudball, Pali Palavathanan and Lizzie Schoon at 15. In case you’re wondering, Lizzie made that dress herself.
Sending pictures of ourselves at 15 obviously struck a chord and several brave people started RSVP’ing with images of themselves at the same age. In the end we ended up with quite a few, a selection of which we’ve posted below (in no particular order, honest). To spare everyone’s blushes, we won’t caption each one, but there’s a full list at the end of this post if you really want to know. Enjoy.
So, from the top we have Harriet Devoy (we’re loving those glasses), Alexis Burgess, Bruce Duckworth (aged 14 and a half, hasn’t changed a bit), David Jones, Frances McConnell eating a gobstopper, Ian Chilvers (just look at that muscle tone), Jack Renwick, Jeff Dale (slightly before 15 we think), Joe Barrell in his ‘difficult years’, Jonathan Mercer, Josie Evans, Kate Fishenden, Kate Shaw from her Vogue modelling phase, Luke Gifford (twice, too good not to share, in his ‘yellow’ period), Mark Chaudoir (in his rockabilly phase), Mark Wheatcroft, Miho Aishima (at her prom, actually 18), Marta Rodriguez, Paola Faoro, Peter Beverley, Phil Carter with dog, Piers Komlosy, Quentin Newark, a soft focus Richard Murray, Sarah Fullerton, Sarah Temple, Sebastian Conran (albeit at 18), Syd Hausmann and a lot of bubble perms and finally Vicky Broackes on a very large cannon.
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15.11.07
Perpetually interesting
A few thoughts ago we were musing on the similarity of the new Bravia campaign to certain US based artists, which also reminded us of the hoo-ha a few years ago when Honda's cog campaign was found to be uncannily similar to an art film on perpetual motion. Only last week Creative Review reported on another uncanny resemblance between advertising and art. But, wait, there’s good news. Martijn Oostra recently sent us the link to this neat little animation for Hema, who are the kind of Dutch Woolworths. It's great, and well worth a look (but give it time to load).
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12.11.07
Kill yourself, fart less?
Last week we ran a student workshop at LCC (London College of Communication) on greenwash, green issues and how designers and communicators might react to the problem. The header picture seemed to sum up some of the less interested group members’ feelings, but the majority had some really interesting ideas.
This was an idea where every item you bought had a sort of carbon code which you could just tap into your phone, to make working out your carbon footprint that much easier. 
The group (mainly populated by early twenty-somethings) pointed out that whilst they wanted to use the carbon calculators available, because they often lived in groups/student houses it was really tough for them to work them out, so making it much easier would help. This thought was that carbon should be declared as simply as calories, saturated fats, etc... 
..or as stickers on your fruit. Not sure how M&S would react to that. 
After some discussion of the relative problems of measuring the actual physical form of carbon, and looking at these examples from the johnson banks archive... 
...there were some good thoughts about art installations in airports: this is a room that fills with steam (or appears to be full of steam) to make the analogy between distances flown and kettles constantly boiling. 
Or installations of dead light bulbs equivalent to the journey you’re about to make. 
This idea centred on your shopping receipt, that would begin normally... 
..then would contain important green information about that which you’d just purchased. As a polite way of pointing out green issues, you could see this happening, albeit with an enlightened retailer. 
This group wanted to make the point that standard laptops contained parts from all over the world (so creating vast ‘carbon miles’) - their answer was to issue laptop passports (obviously). 
The same group wanted to smuggle stickers onto the Macs at the Apple store that recorded just how far the parts had actually travelled. 
Another group wanted to break in to the control rooms for the newly installed plasmas on London escalators, hack into them and show electronic posters that made you realise that electronic ads used too much electricity. This of course then sparked one of those ‘what uses more carbon’ discussions, electronic plasma screens or printing up paper posters? This student wanted to make the point about oil costs and the making of soft drinks. 
Luckily the mood was lightened when it was revealed that the Spice Girls are going green on their US tour. 
Interesting stuff. Thanks to the LCC Third Year Graphics for taking part.
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10.11.07
Art, stamps, queen and country
In a strange twist of events, two of our regular clients have been thrown together by a piece of modern art. The Art Fund has recently purchased for the Imperial War Museum an unusual artwork by Turner prize-winning artist Steve McQueen. He is making up stamp sheets commemorating British soldiers who have died in Iraq, inspired the by the short time McQueen spent there. The artist, however, views the piece as incomplete until they have become actual stamps in their own right, and The Art Fund have started a petition on his behalf lobbying the Royal Mail to supply him some philatelic closure. The artworks themselves are unnerving - the soldiers themselves are often grinning or smiling, and are just placed under the Queen’s silhouette (name, regiment etc is printed in the margin). As today’s Guardian points out, ‘there is nothing else besides the Queen’s head; neither righteous bombast nor shrinking euphemism’. 
The idea itself neatly sidesteps one of the recurring issues of designing stamps, known as the dead people rule, where the only people allowed to be alive on a stamp are supposedly just members of the royal family, or deceased heroes. Sadly, by dint of their subject matter, these stamps would be entirely possible. 
By lobbying for them to be turned into stamps, the artist and The Art Fund are bumping head first into Royal Mail’s system, which is famously lobbied almost constantly by bodies asking for commemorative stamps, and also plans its stamp issues at least a couple of years ahead. Yesterday Royal Mail said they ‘celebrated symbols rather than individuals’, so, good luck, would be our advice. 
But seeing as Royal Mail has been known to slacken the dead people rule in times of World Cup’s won or Ashes returned (and technically on 50% of our Beatles stamps earlier this year), they might waver on this one too (although these are excused as examples of collective, team efforts, not individuals). Perhaps these recently deceased unsung heroes could be commemorated too? Yes, perhaps.
By Michael Johnson Pictures from The Art Fund, or from View Images.
All for a good cause, apologies for any copyrights infringed
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07.11.07
Looking again at La Villette
Slightly out of the blue, we’ve just done a project for an old client, Parc de La Villette, in Paris. Digging out the logos and finding the right typefaces reminded us that working within the rules we’d set down was still really interesting. We also began to wonder if the scheme itself was, in some respects, ahead of its time.
We were originally approached in the late nineties: whilst they had a good ‘name’ in Paris, their housestyle had imploded. The park itself is a vast area offering exhibitions, museums and concert halls, with a unique architectural style, and famous and varied gardens. But its most famous constituent part (the Cité des Sciences, Paris’s equivalent of London’s Science Museum) was taking all the attention.
Whilst Grapus’ original identity (from 1982) had worked well to help launch the park as whole, the identity’s rules had left the park with just a green triangle, which they had tried to turn into their property, but to no avail. They were left with a sort of identity bouillabaise, where sponsors logos were just as likely to have prominence, a kind of reverse gestalt (the sum of the parts being less than the whole). 
We travelled back from the briefing frantically drawing ideas that would enable the park to ‘own’ all the myriad activities they put on. This has of course become the classic cultural identity brief, to promote the mothership whilst letting the identities of each circus, play or concert still play on.
Our first thoughts involved brackets, but the Bibliotheque de France had just started using those. Our next ideas were a bit like rather stale versions of classic Vignelli ‘bar’ schemes, but then when we put the ‘bar’ on an angle and let it appear on any edge, we started to get somewhere. We turned the triangle into a ‘nick’ that punctured the bar and became the ‘V’ of Villette. We suggested the restricted use of just one typeface.
The ideas went down well, and the client asked us to ‘do a few posters’, a relationship that at one point meant 30 projects a year, and still continues now.
Our early applications concentrated on establishing the idea in Parisian commuters’ minds, and gave us the chance to see if the toolbox of design devices we’d developed would work.
Early on we discovered that when we had the opportunity to influence the poster imagery, there was something about our French client that appreciated slightly odd, quite surreal ideas. This early poster from 2000 was for an exhibition on cakes, cannibalism, death and fertility (obviously). Our brief? ‘You could explore the idea of the devil if you want. But please make sure you use the triple breasted cake woman’. 
From then on, the gate was open. We’ve always liked these acrobatic sardines, for the circus troupe Licorne...
...and this gearstick of emotions for a play about a traffic jam. 
From an early period our client gave us the freedom to explore that we still sometimes miss in our English clients. Rather than criticise our lack of moving image experience, they simply asked us to get on with it. Our first attempts were pretty awful, in retrospect, but this identity for their famous outdoor film festival still stands up. 
A few years later, with slightly more budget, we pulled the stops out on this 30 second cinema commercial, based on a revised positioning that had been developed for the park as a ‘garden of culture’ (jardin des cultures). Sounds much better in French, doesn’t it? 
Meanwhile the scheme itself was expanding – four years ago we turned the bar into sky to show that this was was a La Villett-été
(a Villette-summer). Using the identity as a container in this way (an idea that seems to have become popular more recently) seemed to allow us to make that summer’s posters more dramatic than before. 
We used the container idea again for another Groupe F poster a year later.
For another year, we developed a series of bars that began solid and then developed into different symbols, whether they be words, hearts, stars, ink-splats, you name it. Rather than undermine the idea it seemed to give it added emphasis, and let us choose a logo that suited the communication.
Here are some more examples.
When we were asked to develop ideas for a marionette biennale that would be held in multiple locations (and hence not use the bar) we simply retained the typography – this still gave the posters a ‘La Villette’ feel, a kind of branding by stealth. The scissor face happened by accident and nearly didn’t get accepted until we suggested that it ‘cut the strings of traditional puppetry’ (and then it sailed through). 
Then we had to find ways to emulate it in subsequent years: in 2003 inspiration came from a humble tool box. 
2005’s poster was inspired by laundry. 
One year, our concept for the year’s events involved bringing the park’s grass off the ground and onto symbols of the different events. Looks great, but was incredibly tricky to do.
For another year, we used the events held in the park to construct a kind of mechanical garden. 
All the time were finding more ways to experiment with the typographic and visual rules we’d laid down. 
Which brings us back to TAOUB, the Moroccan dancing troupe whose poster we’ve just finished. Their acrobatic tour de force fuses traditional and modern dance and involves a huge carpet, 12 acrobats and one big piece of fabric. If you’re in Paris this winter, it’s supposed to be great.
When we talk about this project, probably our longest running cultural identity scheme, we tend to talk about the design elements as a kind of ‘frame’ into which the events can fall. At other points we’ll point out that by owning an edge of any piece of communication, it then leaves the rest of the poster for the subject itself. It’s true that working in this asymmetric, five degrees off-centre way is a challenge, but it seemed right for this project, for a client keen to be seen as décalé (which loosely translates as sticking out, being edgy). Just that five degree shift also, somehow, makes the scheme feel much more French, somehow. The challenge will be to make the scheme stick out for another decade. We hope it will. Postscript: only months after writing this, the relationship with La Villette finished. Shame.
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06.11.07
Eye spy
Rick Poynor’s (pretty balanced) review of Applied Green has been posted here. As he says, ‘It would be good to see a conference with this level of ambition aimed directly at designers. But don’t forget to invite the activists, politicians and marketing people. If communication design is to play a role – and it must – designers need to catch up fast’. Hear, hear.
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05.11.07
A camera pointed determinedly downwards
Regular visitors to Thought for the week may remember a flurry of Japanese manhole covers we were recording some months back. One of our contributors last time around has been touring Japan again with his camera pointed determinedly downwards. Here’s what he found this time. 
Thanks to Michael Tudball for the pictures
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02.11.07
Beware of thought
Too much time spent doing and not enough thinking this week. But this Look Up, submitted by Josie Evans, made us feel better.
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