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20.12.07
Thought for the week review of the year, part two
Following up from last week’s review of the year in general, part two is a review of our year. It’s been an in-between twelve months, really. We were fifteen this autumn, but like a mumbling teenager forced to talk to auntie at Christmas, we can’t really remember that much about what we’ve been up to. There’s been a bit of gongage, (but not that much to be honest), we’ve been in the Guardian once or twice, we’ve travelled the world. We’ve worried about our carbon footprint. Oh, and we’ve been to Wales, a lot. (More about that next year).
It’s probably been the year when this section of the site got into its stride - perhaps as a result of that we’ve been linked to many times from our favourite sites across the pond, like Design Observer, Swiss Miss and Quipsologies. So thank you all for that. But year ends, for designers, are the time to think about what you’ve been up to and, crucially, was any of it any good? Maybe it really is time to become a mac-artworker, or finally apply for that teaching job? Bearing in mind that even in a really good year, most design companies struggle to produce more than five good projects, we thought we’d try and make a selection. In an attempt to shortlist (and remain democratic) we had a studio vote on our favourites. So here are the results, in reverse order, of course. At equal 5th 
We started the year designing this odd typeface for Quaker Oats, derived from an idea about crop circle typography. We haven’t done a crop circle typeface before. 
Also at equal fifth, our identity for the BFI finally launched properly - it’s good to see the scheme up and running and appearing all over town. 
And also fifth, this unusual identity featuring sculpted art for the charity, Living Paintings. 
In fourth place, Save the Children 
One of the largest corporates we’ve done this year has been this full-scale revamp of Save the Children UK’s identity. A major part of the scheme was asking children to redraw their corporate typeface. All of a sudden Gill looked interesting again. Coming in third, a ram-punched Christmas card 
Now this may be in the top five just because it’s fresh in the memory, but we’re really pleased with this eco-friendly solution to both the office clear-up and the dreaded Christmas card, all at the same time. We’ve even had a major gallery on the phone looking to adapt the idea for all their left-over print, which would be interesting. The runner-up? A T cup 
Also recent, this T cup and saucer for the Ginza-based Creation Gallery. And tied for first place... ...are this project initiated for this year’s V&A village fete where we decided to take humble aerogrammes into entirely new airspace... 
...and last (but not least) our stamps for the Beatles. 
Coincidentally, the stamps came out right at the beginning of the year, and left us with the slightly sinking feeling that we might not be able to top them all year. Perhaps our suspicion was right. They’re only on sale until the 8th of Jan next year, so get a move on if you want to order a few sets of your own.
Unless we have blinding flashes of inspiration over the break, that’s our lot for the year. Back with fresh thoughts and new year’s resolutions in January.
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18.12.07
Recycled christmas trees
The johnson banks Christmas card this year takes the form of trees ram-punched out of magazines and brochures that we found around the office. There’s no point in going green and then merrily printing off some paper based extravaganza, so we set ourself the task of re-using and recycling items that were close to hand.
The picture above shows a V&A report, a copy of the Economist and an old Design Council brochure. We also found that Design Week magazine made really good trees as well (shown below).
We die-cut the star shaped envelopes out of old posters. 
Here are some of the trees at this weekend’s design grotto at Somerset House. 
Look, there are ice skaters in the background. It must be Christmas. 
In case you’re wondering, this is what the cutter looks like. 
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14.12.07
Thought for the week review of the year, part one
We ended last year with a review of our musical highlights of 2006, and this year thought we’d go a little further. This is the first part of our review, part two will follow next week.
The ‘wish we’d done that’ design award 
Sometimes London-based design consultancy The Partners attracts more than its fair share of mutterers and grumblers (possibly due to its penchant for ‘not really real’ projects and its blanket-bombing approach to awards schemes). But the naysayers will have been spluttering into their vanilla lattes when this fabulous project for the National Gallery came out. Cannily using the sponsorship of HP, old masters sprung up in perfect facsimile framed fashion all over London. Is it advertising, design or just the best bit of ambient since Britart? Who cares, it’s great.
The ‘wish we’d done that too’ design award... 
…goes to this much blogged and discussed project by Michael Bierut for Saks Fifth Avenue, which created almost infinite tessellations of a tiled version of the new ‘old’ logo. Lovely. Mr Bierut is right up there for book of the year with his collection of articles too.
The ‘wish we’d done that as well (but we’re not sure about the type)’ award...
...goes to this interesting scheme for the Casa da Música in Portugal by Stefan Sagmeister. An interesting 2d take on a 3d idea. Very neat.
The ‘you’ve got to admire their chutzpah’ award
To Wolff Olins for consistently designing things that get up people’s noses, but not caring two hoots about it. Their schemes for the Olympics and Wacom attracted huge amounts of pixel-and-print based vitriol but we’re willing to bet that the old adage about no such thing as bad publicity has been much used at WO this year. The Alex Ferguson school of siege mentality management goes to Creative Director Patrick Cox’s comments about the olympics logo being ‘the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice’.
With all the spleen-venting over the other two, the NYC logo has come out, and despite a really nasty version of it appearing on the New York taxis, it looks OK to us. Of course in the hands of the agency the logo retreats back into the corner (no surprise there then)...
...but if layouts like this ever get out of the powerpoint file and into applications it will be an interesting scheme.
The most useful website of the year
Ok, now this was a tough one. Many hours were spent on del.icio.us and Facebook at johnson banks towers, much gazing at the fantastic Designboom and the hardy perennial Swiss Miss. The girls in the office are lobbying to include the Topshop website too. Mmmm not sure. But at number one it just has to be FFFFound - ever since a friend invited us we’ve been completely hooked on its constant variety and magically easy interface. Visual scrapbooking was never easier. Beg, borrow or steal an invite as soon as you can. Our consistently hilarious website read of the year goes to... 
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is truly great. If you haven’t been, put twenty minutes aside, read and weep with laughter. If you’re looking for entertainment of a different variety, try David Airey :: Graphic and Logo Designer.
Our best web-article of the year 
A very tough category but it has to be this marvellous article by Armin Vit, lifting the lid on this year’s must-have typographic tic – counterless, blocky type. Like any good bit of writing, Armin’s piece simply verbalises what we’d all been thinking, that there’s a heck of a lot of that idea around. Anything that you’ve seen or done in this style this year is going to look so 2007 in just a few months time.
Our records of the year
Well in terms of ‘most played’ it would have to be this year’s Cinematic Orchestra, Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem and, er, Mika (sorry). Slightly embarrassingly we’re still playing Hot Chip as well. Whilst in memory lane we’re hammering old Rage albums and those early seventies Miles Davis albums like Live Evil and On the corner. Still sound great.
The gig of the year
Well The Cinematic Orchestra at the Albert Hall was quite something, and sadly we can’t tell you what the Rage reunion at Coachella was like, but we wish we’d been there. We can, however, tell you that Zeppelin at the O2 was truly awesome (dude).
Must-have designer gadget of the year
It has to be the iphone. But we’re waiting until it’s 3G,
sorry Steve.
Must-have designer domestic present of the year 
It has to be these Pantone mugs. Never has your dishwasher looked so colourful. (But not pink – bizarrely PMS 239 can only be handwashed. Weird). Last but not least - confectionery revival of the year 
The return of the 80s staple for fatties everywhere, the Wispa.
That’s all for now. The review of the johnson banks year will follow next week.
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13.12.07
More grotto news
The johnson banks studio is awash with boxes and poster tubes as we prepare for this weekend’s Design Grotto at Somerset House. Our stall will be called Postability and we’ll be selling a whole load of stuff that we’ve produced over the last few years, plus some overs of posters that we’ve found in a recent clear-up. Here’s what we’ve found. There are some copies of these posters for Time Out from a few years back. 
We also found some copies of this huge lecture poster from about ten years ago on Design and Advertising. 
There are three posters in this series for the V&A’s Zoomorphic Exhibition. 
We have A1 sized versions of this Santachrist image we did for the Design Museum. 
And copies of this ‘R’ poster that was produced for an exhibition at the British Museum... 
...and some copies of this poster, done for the Lisbon Biennale in 2005. 
Oh and the 2007 edition of the tree. 
We have some alphabets left... 
...some airmail sets left over from the summer... 
...and various copies of our Pun Post series. Here’s Direct Mail and French Letters.
And, if we have enough spare, some copies of our 2007 Christmas card, hot off the press.
There’s a price limit of £20, so everything will be £19.99. No seriously, the big posters will be £20, the smaller ones a bit less.
OK, it’s fair to say we haven’t sorted out our pricing yet. Anyway, see you there. As a reminder, it’s on from 6-11pm on Saturday evening, and 11am-6pm on Sunday. And it’s free.
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10.12.07
What kind of T would you like?
The Creation Gallery in Ginza has an exhibition at the end of each year where they ask a couple of hundred designers from around the world to design or decorate a product. So far we’ve done trousers, canvas shopping bags, fans – this year our brief was to celebrate the ritual of tea drinking by designing a cup and saucer. After a little thought we thought a ‘T’ cup would be amusing, and set about trying to design one where different T’s began on the cup then continued on the saucer. Actually incredibly difficult to do, but these pictures we’ve just received from the gallery seem to look OK. 
The saucer looks especially weird - here’s a top view. 
Here are some of the other cups and saucers:
from Yoshio Hayakawa. 
From Takahiro Nagino. 
From Shigeru Tamura. 
From Takeshi Nishioka. 
They are on exhibition and on sale from mid December – if you’re in Ginza for the next month you can buy them/order them there and all proceeds go to Unicef. You’ll find more information here.
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05.12.07
It’s that time of year again
For several years the johnson banks Christmas cards were nice gentle affairs that cost very little and probably slipped dangerously quickly into nearby wastebaskets. Then, in the middle of the decade, we changed tack and started to take a different approach. It all started with this idea, where we nipped off to William Hill and bought five hundred separate one-pound bets on it snowing at Christmas, and sent the slips as cards. We had clients complaining, only partly in jest, that they’d spent their break thinking about us (and whether they’d win or not). 
Galvanised by the way we’d entered our friends and clients consciousnesses, next year’s was a much bigger deal. Inspired by a discussion about all the dull things we all get up to at Christmas, we developed a special kit that allowed you to cheat your way though the holiday. It came in a simple looking box... 
...which opened to reveal Monopoly cards, a blank domino with die-cut white dots, a pair of loaded dice, and a handy little book of those weird two-letter words you’re allowed to use in Scrabble (you know, like Xu, an aluminum coin and monetary unit in Vietnam. Obviously.) Just to round off your Scrabble game there were two blank tiles. And a set of four aces. 
The Monopoly cards were just slightly modified to work in the cheater’s favour. 
It’s fair to say that this went down a storm. A little worried about how to follow that, we took the obvious way out in 1997 and threw money at the problem. The solution? A pack of Christmas chocolates wrapped in specially printed foil illustrations of the johnson banks team. 
The back of pack broke down the precise contents. 
The bar-code, when viewed at the right angle, revealed the fiscal disaster that we had created. 
As the end of 1998 drew near, and aware that 1999 would be stuffed with Millennium nonsense, we decided to issue a completely deadpan set of Millennium Guidelines, issued anonymously. 
This was the Millennium typeface. 
Only when you got some way into the piece did you realise that someone was taking the mickey. Here’s the specially developed Lorennium Ipsum, saving the ‘time and expense of commissioning copywriters’. 
Only this number revealed where the guidelines had come from. We had a lot of calls. We even heard that one client called a meeting to discuss how to implement them. 
The next year coincided with an office move, so we plumbed office catalogue vernacular and sent a fake sale brochure offering up the Omnicrom machine, old Macs and obsolete technology. 
Once in, and settled, we then decided to pastiche Christmas wrapping papers and tags, and issued our own, dedicated set, complete with terrible illustrations. 
We can’t find a copy of our 2001 card, but it was a cruel joke-headhunters letter offering us all up for employment. A recession was obviously beginning to bite. In 2002, we had a two-pronged strategy. Important people got sent a book in November...
...then in January we sent a bilingual Still a Good Idea brochure which carefully presented old rejected ideas for potential purchase... 
...such as these rejected (but we think hilarious) packs for Doritos. 
By the end of that year we were obviously in a hugely cynical frame of mind, and sent what appeared to be the first of a series of mailings on How to Promote A Design Company. Step one was, of course, designing the Christmas card.
Still in a determinedly anti-design mindset, 2004’s card featured faux-pastel portraits of the team drawn specially for us by the worst illustrator we could find in Leicester Square. 
Inside, recipients found a bizarre round-robin-style end of year note written the way your long-forgotten Auntie might write every year from New Zealand. 
Last year we sent fake Royal Mail ‘apology’ bags that contained the edges of very desirable objects and a tiny copy line hidden in the code that suggested it’s the thought that counts. 
So, that leads us to this year. Well, we’re still working on it (of course), but as a hint, it involves going through the plan chests, cutting up old posters...
...and gathering up old brochures and magazines. Watch this space. 
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04.12.07
Post No.160
In a couple of weeks time, the johnson banks Thought for the week will be two years old. What began as a slightly throwaway request to our web coders for ‘a page to make the odd observation’ has slowly but surely developed a life of its own. We really didn’t take it too seriously for six months until we started to notice that thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of people were visiting regularly. That of course meant that we had to make sure we had something to say, that thoughts needed to be thunk. Anyone who writes regularly knows that isn’t always guaranteed, but we’ll do our best. Don’t worry, we’re not fishing for compliments here. The point of this post (number 160, so that’s an average of about one-and-a-half thoughts per week, hopeless really) is just to point out that we’ve tweaked the structure of TFTW a little. So those of you reading through RSS readers might take a second to visit in that old fashioned, browser of choice way. We’ve added a search function which seems to work quite well (it’s set on a medium level of ‘fuzziness’, whatever that means). For those too lazy to search (that makes most of us then) there’s a ‘best thoughts so far’ column on the right which of course is highly subjective. If you think we’ve missed anything good, please let us know. If you think we’ve over-egged anything, well, it’s tough really, isn’t it? We’ve also added an ‘Add to’ function button at the base of articles to help you use your bookmarking software of choice. We haven’t got tags yet, we’re not convinced they work that well. Does anyone ever really read a blog by its tags? And don’t hold your breath for a tag cloud. We still haven’t added a comments function, and we remain resolutely one-way in this communication. A mono-blog, rather than a blog, you might say. To be honest, the only reason we avoided comments in the first place was because there’s nothing worse than that Comments: 0 bit at the bottom, is there? (The blog equivalent of the tumbleweed joke). Also, we feared we might start writing thoughts just to get a reaction, which is a different kind of writing really. It also began to dawn on us that most of the commentary could potentially be pretty nasty, so we’ve decided to stay comment-free. That doesn’t mean to say we don’t want to hear from you. (Watch out, participation paragraph approaching). People really do email thoughts to thought (at) johnsonbanks.co.uk, and we do read them, honest. Some of them have made really good posts too. If you really do have a thought or just want to hurl abuse at us, that’s fair enough, just fire away. Actually, we’re actually genuinely interested in which thoughts you find the most interesting. For example, would you like more or less of the 'general observations on design’ stuff. More or less of the ‘projects by johnson banks’ stuff? More (or less) about design history? That kind of balance is quite hard to get, so all views appreciated. That was a little too close to a readership survey section, so we’ll stop. Feeling quite uncomfortable now. Onwards to post No. 161. Normal one-way service will be resumed shortly.
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01.12.07
Flag waving, or drowning?
It’s been a blood-pressure raising autumn for flag-waving traditionalists. Their fluttering weapons of choice are being questioned right across the globe.
Back in September New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, raised the thorny issue of whether their flag really needed that Union Jack in the corner and dropped several hints about just using the constellation of stars known as the Southern Cross (only viewable from the southern hemisphere).
Of course, a commonwealth country dropping the jack would simply follow what Canada did in the sixties. When the ensign format was dropped, after few design competitions, Canada emerged with arguably one of the world’s finest flag designs (and a design that doubled up for their government as well). 
There is of course another big claim to the Southern Cross, over the water in Australia. With the final ousting of Howard via the election win of Kevin Rudd, we finally have an Australian premier determined to re-open the issue of Australia’s status as a republic (as well as its stance on Kyoto and Iraq, but that’s another story).
Removing the Queen as head of state would mean a new flag, and Australia is well down that road already. Whilst New Zealand’s NZFlag.com tried to push through a stylised silver fern on black in 2005...
...Ausflag.com has already had a full blown design competition in the late nineties, resulting in the highest placed designs shown below. So if Rudd wants to move quickly, his flags are ready. All he needs to do now is change the minds of Australia’s hard core monarchist blue rinse set (and there are more of those than you think). 
To top it all, this week UK culture Minister Margaret Hodge announced herself open to re-designs of the jack itself, to incorporate a degree of ‘Welshness’.
This is not as easy as it sounds – the jack is a rather cumbersome combination of three flags (St George’s cross, St Andrew’s saltire, St Patrick cross) and much debate surrounds which symbols of welshness we would incorporate. Many wags have suggested that there is already a red dragon in the middle of the red cross, we just can’t see it that well. But, seriously, if we were following the pattern here, the design that should be incorporated is the rather odd looking yellow on black cross of St David. Not very nice.
As you can see from these proposals from the BBC and Guardian websites, adding yellow and black looks really quite odd. Creative Review is calling for its own set of entries too. 
If Ms Hodge is really serious about this, we’d suggest that the colour we’d take for ‘welshness’ would be the green (not the dragon, sorry).
Then we’d set about the jack itself. It’s a design that is notoriously hard to draw (hence all those smart alec’s grumbling about upside down flags on royal occasions). And it’s too wide, being 2 to 1. 
We’d make it a more harmonious proportion. We’d make it easier to draw. We’d brighten the colours, make them more screen friendly. We’d try different ways to get the green in. Something a bit like this, perhaps?
We’d try some more adventurous thoughts as well. 
Ms Hodge, you can find our contact information above. Speak to you soon, maybe?
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