29.03.07
Living Paintings

We’re just putting the finishing touches to this new identity for the arts trust, Living Paintings (formerly The Living Paintings Trust). Living Paintings produce the most incredible, 3d versions of famous artworks for blind and partially sighted children and adults, allowing them to experience with their fingers what most of us appreciate with our eyes. The vacuum-formed pages are then bound into books and distributed nationwide to libraries, schools and galleries.

As you might imagine, producing each version of the art (and now sculpture, music and architecture too) costs a huge amount, so we’re hoping their new identity will help to kick-start interest, and of course, donations.

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26.03.07
Send a letter, 2nd edition

A large order from the new Cibone department store in Roppongi, Tokyo has give us the opportunity to reprint our Send a letter project (where we die-cut 26 letter-shaped postcards). For the 2nd edition we’ve narrowed the range of colours to just the bright ones, used heavier stock (now 700gsm) and amended the designs of three of the letters to make them a bit more mail-friendly. If you can't afford to fly to Tokyo, you could always buy alphabets through our shop, here.

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23.03.07
More of a ‘Look down’ than up

We have an occasional photographic series devoted to lost signage (called ‘Look up’), but we just had to share this ‘Look down’ with you. Someone has very carefully turned this sign on Cromwell Place into Cromweee Place. Probably a bored graphic design student, we reckon. It gets an A+ from us.

Spotted by Katherina Tudball

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19.03.07
We’ve been wodcasted

An online discussion about johnson banks has just been posted on the wodcast site run by Neil McGuire. It also includes interviews with The Future Laboratory and Peter Saville.

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18.03.07
Surreal (paper) things

To coincide with the V&A’s spring blockbuster, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, we’ve just finished these two books for V&A Publishing, called The Surreal Body and Surreal People. Available now from your favourite bookshops (and also featured in this month’s Grafik magazine).

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14.03.07
BFI Southbank launches

Last night saw the launch of the BFI’s new home on the Southbank, with external and internal graphics supplied by johnson banks. Persuading the organisation to adopt such a radical identity has had its tricky moments, but seeing it all up, in 3D, and being celebrated by 900 of London’s film-makers made it all worthwhile.

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09.03.07
Which way now?

Last week, British magazine Design Week indulged in a bit of soul searching. Its topic? The assertion by Mike Dempsey (of CDT) that graphic design had hit a watershed, had plundered all stylistic trends and could only go backwards from here. Ouch.

Some context is needed here – Dempsey penned his polemic soon after having judged Design Week’s own awards and had spent two days thumbing through leaflets, brochures and annual reports, a process destined to remove the will to live from virtually any self-respecting designer. (Most designers love the idea of judging design competitions, but what’s never explained fully until the actual day is the vast amount of total dross that is entered from all corners of the country or globe, depending on the reach of the scheme). Sifting through this graphic detritus is a mind numbing and sometimes depressing task. It’s little surprise that virtually all judges when asked to comment on what they’ve just seen nearly always express disappointment and say ‘the work this year was worse than normal’ or ‘not up to last year’s standard’ or suchlike. It’s a cruel combination of low blood sugar, human nature and the hard stats that show that only 5% of the work will ever be any good.

It’s also virtually impossible to stand in front of a trestle table of shortlisted work and say to yourself ‘we’re experiencing a paradigm shift in our profession here’ – historical context is almost always needed. The D&AD annuals only make sense a couple of years later, when enough time has passed to put the work and any possible breakthroughs into sharper focus.

But this preamble avoids the point. Are we really at a watershed moment? Dempsey has successfully navigated four decades in the profession, has won all the awards you could imagine and has cannily steered his own company through several switches of design vernacular. So as an observer of design styles he should be listened to, at least.

As regards general graphic design, he may have a point. By ‘general graphic design’ I mean the production of little sets of stationery, leaflets, booklets and brochures - what once provided the backbone of most graphic designers’ working lives. Clearly the writing is on the wall for this type of work to have any serious validity for much longer, and any designer dependent on this type of work is either working off their kitchen table or should see the light at the end of the tunnel, quickly, for their own sake. The world has moved on and now the emphasis is either on high level, broad-in-scope branding projects (which is where johnson banks have moved to), or on-line. Anyone left in the middle is either examining their profit-and-loss statements in some detail, churning work out at a rate of knots just to stay afloat, or re-training.

The harsh truth is that the money has moved elsewhere. Once, in the late eighties, I spent nearly £20,000 on just the photography for a bank leaflet. Admittedly, it was an important leaflet (for the student market) and leaflets and posters were then the key ways to approach the market. But still, 20 grand? Only last week a client asked to expand the scope of their annual report but then revealed their photography budget to be a princely £1,000. We gulped a little, but it didn’t come as a huge surprise.

Many clients have moved their day-to-day design needs in-house, or established rosters of malleable suppliers prepared to do their bidding for relatively low levels of fees. In contrast, digital design has recovered from its slump, and supplies an endless treasure trove of material. There will always be examples of the ‘bells and whistles’ school of digital design, but as more websites move ‘back’ to usability, this means less of the designer tics and ‘skip intro’ screens that we once saw, and more genuine ‘read-on-screen’ experiences, not ‘download pdf’ disappointment.

The further implications of web 2.0 are becoming obvious. Tap johnson banks into Google and luckily we’re at the top of the list. But what’s second? The thought for the week you’re currently reading. So, in the short term, visitors come to johnson banks first, thought for the week second. But we can anticipate a time when this page comes highest in Google’s search, and visitors discover our day job via these verbal musings, not our visual pyrotechnics.

For us, this means that virtually every major identity we’ve designed this decade has always had a digital/animated manifestation (some of them such as the BFI even started with the animated version). We’re nearly always involved in the websites. The manuals are almost always delivered as pdfs.

But we’re still avoiding the original question. Are we looking forward or back? For the record we’ve enjoyed the general ‘decorative’ trend and revival of illustration championed by magazines such as Grafik, although its time may soon be over. The revival of modernist tics, visible grids and a highly restricted palette of sans serif typefaces has surely run its course, after a run that has lasted well over a decade. Perhaps we are at one of those ‘which way now’ moments after all.

It’s worth remembering that Dempsey’s comments came after judging graphics for a scheme that for some time has been dominated by 2nd and 3rd generation graduates from British firms such as Pentagram and The Partners. This has given the graphics categories a common ‘look’ and approach, and rarely excites observers into thinking they’re at the cutting edge. More ‘style’ orientated British design companies have tended to ignore this competition and this skews the results - results will be completely different when D&AD casts its global eye over the state of graphics soon, and another view will come later in the year when the Tokyo Type Directors release their (usually fascinating) annual review. These international schemes are usually stronger and less parochial, and are often crammed with energetic views of our graphic futures, not the past.

Dempsey may be looking for the ‘next big thing’ that defines the future of graphic design - the truth is, it’s unlikely to be found in a pile of leaflets and brochures, and more likely to be found on a website or playing on You Tube. Say ‘stationery’ to a client now and they’ll ask about the formatting of their Word templates, not the strength of the watermark on their embossed paper.

I’m personally expecting a revival of messy, wrong design as designers become better and better at loosening up the computers’ tendency to make everything look neat and tidy. Johnson banks will continue to push identity design as far as we possibly can, happily breaking every rule we can in the process. Is that looking backwards? I hope not.

By Michael Johnson

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07.03.07
Stamping the Beatles

This piece about our approach to stamp design has just gone up on the AIGA website in the USA.
(If you haven’t been there before this site is a fantastic resource - many of the other articles in the VOICE
section are well worth a read).

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05.03.07
Have a nice day|Best wishes|Take care|Bye

Due primarily to over-zealous junk mail filters, we often have to check our junk mail folders in case world famous people have emailed us and received no reply (this has happened quite a lot recently). Anyway, on a recent trawl we found this, presumably a mistake.

We thought it was great - the multiple choice code of automated junk is kind of interesting, don’t you think?

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02.03.07
More important than deep pockets

From Glessen in Germany, from Alsaka to Oregon, and as far afield as New Zealand, the emails have flooded in for copies of the melting globe (see this thought earlier in the week).

We’re very pleased that so many people want to use it. Here’s a few selected highlights of what people have said:

I’m very interested in protecting our environment and want to use it for example in our school to make the other pupils more sensible to this topic

I'm making a poster about Spruce Bark Beetles and their impact on the ecosystem due to Global Warming

I would love to have your image in my collection of symbols for earth’s biggest battle (and earth’s rejuvenation!)

i read abouT the global warming icon at the fontblog an wold like to get it too. just because i like it =)

I’d like a copy of the melting globe image because I want to put it on my desktop at work. And when people ask me about it, I can spread the word about global warming

This image is both beautiful and depressing. All the same, thanks for sharing it.

I want to show it to my sons and spark a conversation about what it might mean to them.

And, presumably because we’re not asking for any usage fees, here’s our favourite:

‘Good taste and creativity are more important than deep pockets’

Indeed. As we said before, just email us at thought@johnsonbanks.co.uk, explain what it’s for and we’ll email it to you.

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01.03.07
Exploitation, it seems

This week’s observation about Oxfam’s poster-vote has stirred up a hornet’s nest of protest. It seems none of the design companies concerned (which included This is Real Art, Airside and Naked) were told by Oxfam that they were part of an on-line design vote. Schoolboy error on Oxfam’s part, we’d say.

For your interest here are some of the comments from some of the designer's concerned:

‘None of us had any idea our work was being published online. We got straight onto Oxfam and gave them hell for publishing our work online, not telling us they were putting it up for public scrutiny, reducing a press ad to a thumbnail and only showing a fraction of the thinking that went into our submission’.

‘It's so weird to get people to vote - we hadn't had a chance to work with Oxfam on the job at all, it was totally blind. Surely they should have chosen an agency on the basis of ideas, how they would be to work with etc, not on an implementation that would have changed massively during the design process?’

Sadly the link to the posters is now dead (that’s a bit dodgy too) so you can no longer vote. And we're told that the victors were Naked. Strikes us something of a pyrrhic victory.

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Thought for the week is a regular posting-place for the visual and verbal observations of London design consultancy johnson banks.

Follow this link if you want to see some recent work.

If you want to comment or suggest something yourself please contact thought@johnsonbanks.co.uk

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