27.02.07
Consultation or exploitation?

We’ve done a fair amount of branding work in the charity sector (Shelter, then Christian Aid and currently Save the Children). There’s always an interesting stage on these branding projects where these large organisations try to reach out to their yoof audiences.

With its outwardly agit stance, Oxfam is well placed to do this, so we’re watching their latest initiative with some interest. In a bizarre ‘design idol’ competition, 4 un-named designer’s posters were uploaded (sorry the link is now suspiciously dead) and Oxfam’s young agitators (should that be agi-teens?) were asked to ‘vote for their favourite design’.

Is it just us or isn’t this reducing the design selection process just a little too far? Who are the designers? Are they being paid? And we love the bit that says ‘you can ignore the words for now’. Er, ok, but does that mean we do have the power to change the world or not?

All very odd.

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24.02.07
Get your melting globe here

This may prove to be a completely idiotic thing to do, but here goes.

This piece in last week’s Guardian brought it home, once again, that global warming isn’t just here, it’s out of control. Trouble is, for graphic designers, it’s tough to know exactly what we can do. So here’s a thought. We designed this melted globe icon for a design biennale a couple of years ago, but the symbol now sits unused in our archives.

We think it’s a pretty strong visual of the problem. So, we’re offering this FREE, to anyone and everyone who wants to use it.

Just email us at thought@johnsonbanks.co.uk, explain what it’s for and we’ll email it to you.

This isn’t first come first served, this is all come, all served. Seriously.

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22.02.07
Crop circle typography

Just before Christmas we received a call from ad agency AMV BBDO . They asked us if we could turn crop circles into type (and then an alphabet) for their client, Quaker Oats. We weren’t entirely sure what they meant until they showed us an aerial picture they’d found of an ‘e’ made from a spiral of mandlebrot-like circles, which gave us our starting point. A huge amount of work later, the results are starting to break now on TV and billboards, and below are the typographic highlights.

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20.02.07
Bits of wood and metal

We’ve recently aired our views about not taking awards too seriously, so we’ll just quietly mention that two of our projects were commended in last night’s Design Week Awards (this website, www.johnsonbanks.co.uk and the Christian Aid identity). Our identity project for the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool also won the identity section, described as a ‘throwback to kiss me quick hats and sticks of rock’ and ‘good old fashioned seaside fun’ in Design Week’s book of the night.

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18.02.07
A piece in The Herald Tribune

This piece about stamp design is in the International Herald tribune today. We’re amazed to discover that our recent Beatles stamps are already one of the Royal Mail’s most successful issues, ever. Obviously we put most of that down to the unusual design approach and ground-breaking use of perforations. The fact that the subject matter is the world’s favourite band is just useful back-up really.

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10.02.07
Pick your 20 favourite tracks

It’s difficult, believe me.

I’ve just returned from a brief trip lecturing in Scarborough and Whitby (as you do). Having not been to either since the mid-seventies, it was a strange experience, enhanced even more by a deeply surreal afternoon spent in the studios of BBC Radio York recording an interview for the Dr Rock radio show.

Originally this was billed as ‘play your favourite rock tracks for a couple of hours and chat about graphic design’. To be fair to the organisers, I’d been warned that an air of controlled chaos surrounds the show, and as I sat there cueing up records from my own laptop I began to agree (I think johnson banks might buy BBC York a new CD player as a Valentine’s day present).

Anyway, it was fun, after I’d got used to mixing the records and talking at the same time (tricky bit of multi-processing that). Perhaps that dream of my own late night radio show may have to be postponed for a while…

The threat of choosing rock records for two hours had sent me into a protracted frenzy of Nick Hornby-like list making, but when push came to shove, I only really had time for half of what I’d planned. However Yorkshire has now been subjected to Sufjan Stevens, Joe Satriani and Big Bill Broonzy, all within minutes of each other, which probably made a change.

The show isn't online any more, you missed it sorry, but we're waiting for a CD of the show. If it’s any good we might put it on our downloads page. Might.

For the completists amongst you (and perhaps also for me), here are the 20 favourite rock (or ‘sort-of-rock’) tracks I was planning to play…

Bobby Blue Bland
Farther on up the road

John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
Hideaway

Led Zeppelin
What is and what should never be

Bruce Springsteen
Rosalita

Little Feat
Willin’

The Beatles
Blackbird

Steely Dan
Kid Charlemagne

Cassandra Wilson
Waters of March

Graham Central Station
The Jam

D-flat waltz
Weather Report

Television
Marquee Moon

King Crimson
Fallen Angel

Radiohead
Just

Tortoise
TNT

Pat Metheny
The First Circle

Aphex Twin
Alberto Balsam

Sigur Ros
Hoppipola

Sufjan Stevens
The predatory wasp of the palisades

Rasberry Jam Delta V
Joe Satriani

Mannish Boy
Muddy Waters

By Michael Johnson

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06.02.07
A world awash with ligatures

Designer are magpie-like creatures. If we see a style or approach that we enjoy we’ll absorb some of it, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. It might affect our next project, or the next-project-but-one. Very strong visual styles (like Carson’s typographic blitzkrieg that swept though graphics in the 90s) are easily appropriated and within 3 years can become acceptably mainstream.

But some approaches take a little longer. Standing in front of a mountain of polyboard judging a recent competition it slowly dawned that another sub-style had crept up on us, but this time with stealth.

The typographic flourish called a ligature has become a style. How did that happen? When did that happen? It may be linked to the revival of decoration, illustration and the return to the fray of serif fonts, but it seems that typographers are sticking adjacent letters together with almost unseemly haste.

Originally ligatures were developed by typographers coping with some tricky spacing issues working in metal type. Juxtaposing an ‘f’ and ‘i’ with a ‘�?’ ligature was deemed much nicer to look at than ‘fi’. Some designers used them to solve their design problems, such as John McConnell’s elegant solution for Faber and Faber (neatly followed by Faber and Faber music publishing).

But computer-based setting nearly killed off the ligature and the swash until the recent rise of Opentype fonts and the availability of more type designs with inbuilt flourishes put our frilly friends back on the map.

Emigré’s Zuzanna Licko put her pixels aside and created the typeface Mrs Eaves in 1996, stuffed with virtually every typographic twiddle you could ever want (and perhaps some you wouldn’t). Perhaps we were initially taken aback by such a switch of typographic styles, but now Mrs Eaves is everywhere. Even cuts of old favourites like Caslon have been re-issued, suitably embroidered, so you can swash away ‘til your heart’s content and create that ‘crafted, original, heritage’ look.

In ligature-ville you can read your swashed copy of Wallpaper over breakfast, visit a production company in the morning (Evolutions), buy a house at lunchtime (Chestertons), commission some copy in the afternoon (The Writer) sharpen up your political thinking on the train home (Prospect magazine) and apply for a post-grad at night (University of Birmingham).

Is this just another style or will there be any long-term affects? Better typesetting can only be good, surely, although it’s not entirely clear how ligature friendly HTML is, and spell checkers often can’t ‘read’ words with in-built ligatures.

Interestingly, there are more ligatures or letter symbols on your keyboard than you might think. Ampersands originate from the Latin for ‘and’ (‘et’), that’s why some ampersands look profoundly weird (unless you were forced to do Latin at school). The merchant symbol for ‘at the rate of’ (@) lay under utilised in Qwerty until its new lease of life when chosen to help locate a.person@a.particular.computer in the mid seventies.

The marvellous blog typophile.com recently ran a hypothetical exercise imagining what ligatures and letter-symbols we would have created had current phrases been prevalent before keyboards were truly established. It’s remarkable what distracted typographers can produce to symbolise LOL (lots of love) or WTF (what the f**k) or, my favourite, RTFM (Read the f*****g manual). Of course what we really need is a ligature for www (w3?) or even http://…

Maybe the practically forgotten ‘interrobang’ might make a return (where an exclamation mark and question mark are combined), or the ‘wink’ emoticon
;-) might become embedded into fonts in the near future.

But whether linking letters does any more than just fuel a fad, well, that remains to be seen.

This is an adaptation of a piece written for Design Week magazine by Michael Johnson

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02.02.07
That’s a lot for a poster

We’ve all got used to designer websites and indeed designer website shops. Our retail division does a gentle trade in posters and alphabet sets, it's an interesting sideline and pays for the odd team trip to the Clapham Tandoori. But this takes designer shops to a whole new level. Yes, you read that right, David Carson is asking for 250 dollars for this signed exhibition poster. Now that’s confidence for you.