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30.08.07
Soft, yellow and very very long
The British design and advertising awards and education organisation, D&AD, publishes their annual of selected work next week. Someone different designs the annual each year - this year it’s being done by Fabrica. For images, they sent D&AD flags around the world and asked creatives to interpret the flag in whatever way they wished. (We think they were aiming for some kind of ‘global community of creative people’ kind of thing).
So far, very little has been seen of this project - the more electronically minded contributors have posted theirs here and here, but that’s about it. This is ours (with a lot of help from photographer Richard Maxted). 
Only a few dozen out of the hundreds submitted will be used at a decent size (and we suspect this isn’t one of them, to be honest). It does make you wonder what the world’s creative minds could have achieved with a slightly more, er, meaningful, brief, doesn’t it?
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28.08.07
You are here, 2007
We’ve just run out of our stock of You are here posters. This project dates back to the mid-nineties, and was originally meant to be a tongue-in-cheek, semi autobiographical but mainly fictional guide to graphic design for students. It soon spiralled out of control and became a bittersweet journey through the many different lives of a graphic designer. We used them mainly for college lectures and would get the occasional request for copies, but following its inclusion in the Communicate exhibition in 2004 we’ve had a regular stream of requests. So we’ve just sent off the artwork for its third printing. Every time it re-prints we add a few little extras, and the new version is no different. Here are a few edited highlights - in case you’re wondering it reads upwards, from the roots. Any similarity to yours, ours or anyone else’s lives is of course entirely intentional.
Funnily enough, the student bit has stayed pretty similar.
(We had all, of course, lost our virginity years before going to college). 
We’ve had to make a few concessions to the rise of personal websites... 
...and of course blogging had to get a mention. 
Obviously we’ve never heard of anyone actually publishing a book of their web comments (but you could see it happening, couldn’t you?) 
The actual poster is almost 60 inches tall, and the new print run is on sale now. If you’ve got a spare wall to fill, we’d say it was almost perfect. To buy one, email lizzie [at] johnsonbanks [dot] co [dot] uk
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23.08.07
Just when you thought it was over...
Regular visitors to the johnson banks thought for the week will know that we passed through a ‘manhole’ stage recently. Luckily the good news is that we’ve found more. 
This beauty was spotted by Pali Palavathanan recently in Berlin. 
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20.08.07
17 steps to heaven
We’ve been planning to do this for a while, and a brief summer lull meant we had the time. There’s a tendency sometimes for designers and clients to think that ideas fall, perfectly formed, from the heavens. Well, sometimes the ideas do, but the doing can take a little longer. If you’re not sure what we mean, have a look at these. These are the 17 steps our Think London logo went through from first thought to final logo. 1 
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Phew. Don’t ever let anyone tell you graphic design is easy.
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16.08.07
Not as easy as it looks
It’s become a familiar topic for ad agencies to grumble about brand consultancies. For decades it was clear – ad agencies were the ones that steered brands and made them famous, designers just supplied the logos to go in the corner of the ad, or the end frame. End of story.
But recently it’s become obvious that clients have started to view advertising as just one channel for their communication, not the beginning and end of the story. It’s no surprise that branding designers, usually appointed first, have begun to make major positioning decisions. Agencies get asked to implement them, second. And it’s only a few months since a recent example when BBH parted lost a client over the proposed roll-out of the ‘I (Sony Ericsson) long journeys’ (etc) campaign, the strategy for which emanated from Wolff Olins. 
But ad agencies are fighting back – AMV created BBC 2's new ‘frame’ idents this year. Only last week DDB snaffled Royal and SunAlliance’s brand review. (I fear their ‘answer’ will be pricey TV ads, not a desperately required identity overhaul, but hey what do I know). And earlier this year, Fallon beat off several proper design companies to review BBC radio’s idents.
Here was a chance for advertising to flex those design muscles, and show ’em how it’s done. And yes, they are better than they were, but that’s damning with faint praise - look how awful they were before.
Taking their cue from the previous Radio 1 identity (a ‘1’ in a circle) they’ve taken the decision to, er, put all the numbers in circles. Coloured circles, mind you. Some of the numbers have little ‘gags’ – the ‘3’ contains a bass clef (for music, you see), the ‘4’ a quote mark (I guess that must be for talking), and so on.
Not being a Radio 7 listener I presumed it aired DIY shows until it was pointed out that the symbol was a smile, not a bent nail (shame – that’s an interesting idea for a logo).
What was probably quite a neat little system fell apart somewhere between soho and white city – rather than have any gags for radios 1, 2, 5 and 6, we just have coloured numbers. Oh, and some hair for the Asian network. All for 120,000 pounds. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like Fallon’s work and think they have a better ‘design’ eye than most. But if we’re applying the ‘wish I’d done that’ test, well I don’t. Had this been a blind tasting I’d have guessed this came from a mid-table design company who had their first idea messed up by the client.
Mmm. Maybe this design thing isn’t as easy as it seems?
This is an adaptation of an article by Michael Johnson in this week’s Campaign magazine
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14.08.07
Think, draw, do
Last year a friend contacted us with a book idea about ‘why designers draw’ and it was an interesting exercise in digging out sketchbooks and matching up incomprehensible scribbles with their solutions. The book doesn’t seem to have materialised, but seeing these marvellous ideas for a sketchbook series last week prompted me to dig out what I’d found. It’s worthwhile pointing out that I do still use sketchbooks. I keep them all together, they seem to go back until 1994. I’m not sure what I used before then. 
I of course stick pretty much to the designer’s favourite colour, as you can see, apart from that racy red one.
They’re not comprehesive by any means, but as record of what I was working on, and when, they’re pretty good. There’s definitely a trend recently for mine to become more notebook than sketchbook, but it was good to go back, looking to see how a scribble ended up in comparison to the final idea and what little gems I’d forgotten along the way.
One of the oldest is this initial drawing in 1994 for a show on William Morris. Throughout most of the 90s whacking two pictures together seemed to be everyone’s favourite trick. 
Luckily we found a more interesting way to do the transition for the real thing. (Actually I think we’d do it better now, but it was 1994, give us a break). 
Sometimes I’d find a sketch that seemed suspiciously finished (such as this from late ’96)... 
...but then find my workings out in an earlier book. 
The eventual product looked like this. 
This was an interesting find - a note from early 1997 for a British Icons clock, with my notes about having a famous duo like Wallace and Gromit at two, The Beatles at four, the Spice Girls at five, Sean Connery at seven, etc. 
The actual clock bears the scars of some tricky copyright discussions, The Beatles’ legendary reluctance to take part in anything like this and a decision that I still regret now, letting the Spice Girls go to four once Geri had left. A nice idea became instantly dated, as soon as I caved on that one. 
As I suspected, sometimes ideas that seemed a bit hopeless on paper, such as this poster about the ‘perfect student’... 
...seem to improve immensely when transferred to pixels. 
Some ideas seem to happen suspiciously quickly. My memory of doing More Th>n’s logo in 2000 was that it took an afternoon. I fear (on the evidence of my sketchbook) that it took about ten minutes. 
Trouble is, my tendency to date the books betrays my lack of confidence in some of the ideas. Here’s an early scribble for the Shelter logo, then another a month later. 
Then virtually the same scribbles two months later. 
It’s as though I didn’t believe that we’d got it, and kept looking for something sort of validation (or indeed, a better idea). 
One of our most famous projects seemed to grow (in the autumn of 2001) out of some weird cat scribbles... 
..then these jottings, fuelled as I remember by a lively discussion around the studio. 
Three years later, I remember devoting quite a lot of time to to persuading the Royal Mail to do a Christmas version of the Fruit and Veg stamps (unsuccessful, it must be said). It seemed to involved notes about christmas nuts and vegetables and little jottings of Santa’s beard and antlers (presumably the stickers?). 
These mad boggled-eyes faces were drawn in a cab as I left a meeting with an ad agency who had had a lovely thought about showing the ‘Merry’ and the ‘Down’ side of drinking Merrydown cider with reversible posters. 
They hadn’t asked us to do a poster, but I couldn’t stop myself. Luckily they liked it. 
In some cases I really like the page of drawings, everything looks very fluid and, well, designery. Take these scribbles and end result for a campaign about London as a republic, for Time Out. 
Sometimes the drawings go one way, whilst the end result was quite different. 
Sometimes it just looks like verbal jottings - for this idea the words are well ahead of the pictures. 
Sadly it seems there’s very little drawing for drawings’ sake. Lamps like this are in very short supply. 
There are some nice drawings for projects that failed, like this exhibition proposal for the Science Museum that crashed and burned. 
I’d like to report that the johnson banks studio is stuffed with designers also filling page after page with scribbles, but sketchbooks seem to be in pretty short supply. We had to dig quite a bit to find this, and we’re still not sure if it’s a drawing for a project or just an afternoon spent doing prawn people (or something). 
Luckily Julia did manage to find some tiny drawings that were to lead to something much more impressive. 
But overall, not a bad survey. Apart from a few real howlers, the ideas seem to get from head-to-pencil-to-paper pretty well, and after that it's down to our varying computer skills to decide whether an idea lives or dies. What this journey doesn’t show is all the ideas that happened at the computer and never got anywhere near a pencil (there are quite a few of those). And, as someone pointed out, there are many ideas that just get scribbled on the borders of the brief and are never to be recorded. Shame.
Perhaps I should end with a suitably ironic drawing - one of my earliest drawings for the main johnson banks website, back when we were toying with symbols, not words (but were clear that it should build from the centre). Even a website starts on paper, you see. 
Michael Johnson
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09.08.07
Kick it into touch
We followed a link recently to an article that interviewed the designer of the NYC Subway map, Michael Hertz. Now we’ll admit to being slightly behind this debate on this side of the pond, but we get the feeling that Hertz’s map is still widely disliked by many people. But it has frustrated nearly everyone by still being there, 30 years later.
Hertz himself obviously prides himself on this and says ‘it is a 30 year-old design. This kind of longevity is virtually unheard of in the transit business with the exception of London’.
Ah yes. London. That’s the fly in the ointment here. New York’s closet modernists love to gripe about the fact that they had a design worthy of Harry Beck’s masterpiece in the shape of Vignelli’s 45 degree tour-de-force, but that was chucked out after a decade by the Manhattan Transit Authority (MTA). 
Truth is Vignelli’s was a map made for dry mounting and putting on a wall, not being used, but Hertz’s organic monster (recently called a ‘mongrel’ by the New York Times) is surely the worst subway map of the world’s great cities. This is its current incarnation. Lovely. 
Here’s London’s, as if you needed any reminding. 
And Paris. 
And Berlin. 
And Tokyo. (OK it looks challenging but it does cover a city of 30 million people, and it works). 
Luckily Hertz’s proposed re-design of London’s map based on ‘modified geography’ has never seen the light of day (we can only guess it would mean something a little like this). 
In case you’ve never seen it, London’s map (prior to Beck’s brainwave) was an organic disaster zone too (apologies to any living relatives of its designer, a Mr Fred Stingemore. True). 
It seems that Hertz is a little riled by a newcomer to this story, in the shape of the Kick Map, designed by Eddie Jabbour. It looks like this. 
And putting the two maps end to end, you can see the difference.
You don’t have to be either a brain surgeon or indeed a map designer to work out which one is doing it for us. And looking at these kind of discussions, a lot of New Yorkers seem to agree. The main complaint about the proposal seems to be that Jabbour’s design has concentrated on the tube lines and abandoned any real pretence of being a road map of Manhattan at the same time, which might leave people disorientated when leaving a station. But if a medieval city layout like London can survive without a definitive street map, why should Manhattan (based, after all on a grid system) need one? It takes ten seconds at the most to orientate yourself on any Manhattan corner - ever tried working out which exit you need to take at Bank station in London, or Shinjuku? Now that’s difficult. Of course you have the occasional geographical quirk with simplified maps, such as the two stops on the London map, Charing Cross and Embankment being a couple of hundred yards apart, not the mile it might seem on the map. And there’s the thousands of tourists who diligently change lines to get to Covent Garden not knowing it’s just a minute’s walk from Leicester Square. These are just little design ‘trades’ we make in return for clarity. Apparently the Kick Map has been rejected by the MTA who still say they prefer what they have, clinging on to some weird and rather quaint notion of geographical accuracy. Trouble is they seem to have forgotten that most first time visitors to New York will look at the MTA map, recoil in horror and use the simpler one in their guide book. We’d take clarity over chaos any day of the week.
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06.08.07
Books, beaches and Bierut
It’s that time of the year when summer reading lists cram the culture pages of the quality Sundays and in the Johnson house it was no different. The children clutched the latest Voldermort-fest and dipped tweenage toes into Dan Brown. The wife packed masses of intelligent chick-lit. I, as ever, couldn’t decide. Would it be a mauling by Monbiot or a slow wade through Alistair Campbell’s diaries? Back copies of The Economist or stealing the Potter from small ones when they weren’t looking?
But then my imported copy arrived just in time and it was decided: I was going on holiday with Michael Bierut.
The wife of course lifted her eyes to the heavens, probably remembering the many holidays I’d spent glued to Mr Poynor’s collections or the consecutive holidays that were spent (with small children) with daddy ‘trying to write his book’. And on the surface, taking a design textbook on holiday is a strange thing to do. I certainly got some odd looks on the beach, but that was probably because I was laughing, a lot, turning over page corners and scribbling in margins like some demented fool cramming for a design exam.
Some disclosure is required here, because the author and I go back. In fact we go back further than he may realise because once, at the end of the eighties, I rather naively dropped off my folio of poorly presented glass slides at the then high temple of minimalism that was Vignelli. I duly returned a day later to find my folio, unscathed, with one of the most polite form letters I had ever received which thanked me for dropping it off, the presentation was interesting, there weren’t any opportunities but thanks anyway, yada yada, yours Michael Bierut.
I kept that letter for some time, because it contained the only words of encouragement from that trip. (It was a trip full of criticism for the way I looked, the length of my hair, my lack of a tie, my slightly dodgy teeth, you name it really). I then watched the design output, the move to a little-known global branding outfit, the growing portfolio, the writing and the advent of Design Observer. When we finally met in the early nineties we realised we both shared various similar traits: the ability to bore anyone near us senseless about the minutiae of our chosen business; a geeky love of the ‘name that typeface’ game; an encyclopedic love of design history; the determination to be the first people to bring the typeface Souvenir crashing back into fashion, and an interest in words.
Through various journals, collections then websites it became clear that Mr B was a good writer. No, hang on, a really good writer. One of his partners once confessed to me that they got him to write their proposals because he was so much better at them.
Perhaps a bit of context is needed here because there still aren’t that many designers who can write. It’s not a great surprise that primarily visual people should feel a little word shy - designers have often gathered around them good suits to help them communicate, whether through proposals, powerpoint or presentations. The incidence of mild dyslexia amongst designers rockets to around 30%, apparently, so once the college dissertation is done and dusted most are happy to leave it at that.
On my bookshelves I have a small collection of Ken Garland’s writing. Paul Rand, of course, was well known for penning the occasional block-busting essay. Chip Kidd even wrote a great novel, The Cheese Monkeys (albeit about graphic design, it’s true). The bookshelves of Magma in London groan primarily with picture books and the writing collections are multi-authored (like the Looking Closer series that also involves Bierut) or are from proper bona fide critics like Poynor and Heller. Attempts by designers to write are either limited to introductions to their own glossy monographs (sometimes not even that), or overview/how to books like Quentin Newark’s What is Graphic Design?, Adrian Shaughnessy’s How to be a graphic designer: Without losing your soul, or my own offering. All are books content to balance words and pictures in the knowledge that designers need pictures to get them through to the finish line, if they’re to get there at all.
Bierut’s collection is different. 79 essays, consisting (I’d guess) of between 600 and 1200 words each. So about 80,000 words in total, spread over two decades of writing. No pictures. To give some sense of scale of this achievement, when I set about writing the 18 chapters of my own book, Problem Solved, the only way I could mentally get myself through the pain of it all was to mutter to myself ‘think of it as writing 18 articles’. But, 79? Now, that’s a lot.
There’s a strong chance that you will have read some of it before, especially as many were first aired on Design Observer. It’s very nice to re-read them in a good old-fashioned analogue environment. There’s a subtle running gag that he and his partner Abbott Miller have developed of setting each essay in a different font so you can divert yourself with the type gags. A story on the branding of the town Celebration is set in the project’s typeface Cheltenham, an essay on script-writing in American Typewriter, an essay bemoaning the prevalence of ITC Garamond set in the hated specimen, and so on.
I noticed that I had inadvertently used the language of several of the essays myself by some sort of osmosis. I’ve developed a weird mental image of the teenage Bierut geekily burying his head in a pile of books whilst mentally critiquing their covers. I now know a lot more about architecture. I’ve learned that he’s as interesting writing about all sorts of subjects and regularly ‘plays away’ from his home subject of design – there’s even an engaging piece about the perils of going to the gym. It was great to re-read an early piece that he had grandly titled ‘How to become famous’ and to realise that I’d taken one of the pieces of tongue-in-cheek advice (always make sure your awards entry is physically bigger than everyone else’s) slightly too literally on more than one occasion.
In essence the main writing tips I’ve gleaned from the essays are as follows:
Don’t be afraid to write in the first person. Sometimes the blogosphere is criticised (rightly) for devoting too many pixels to narcissistic word-jockeys juggling bad grammar, but Beirut’s writing seems to rise above it. He regularly reveals his own vanity and you still can’t hate him for it, dammit.
Don’t be afraid to side-track yourself or try a different topic. Hey, if a graphic designer can write an entertaining essay about falling off a treadmill…
Don’t worry about revealing the subject of your article until the first or second (or sometimes third paragraph). This article, technically a book review, is masked in a discussion about holiday reading matter, if you think about it.
Do be afraid to hand out advice. This only works if you’re well respected, preferably world-wide. Cyberspace is now sagging with would-be experts endlessly writing ‘how-to’ lists with one eye on their RSS feeds, but Beirut is one of the few that can get away with it.
Do worry about how you start, and crucially, end, a piece. One of the best copywriters I ever worked with would constantly quiz me, when writing long copy – ‘have you got your end-line yet?’ Beirut is a master. Read and learn.
Oh, and don’t be afraid to write a list.
It’s clear is that this book confirms him as one of our living design treasures. If he and I were in ever in any kind of design race he’s many, many laps ahead. I thought, for a while, that I probably had more yellow pencils than him, until it was quietly revealed to me than Pentagram New York didn’t enter D&AD to spare the London office’s blushes. I have a couple of those ADC cube things but I fear he has cupboards full of those. Sure, I was a president once of a big design organisation but he’s been president forever of about 4 million over there. I bet he has trillions more Google hits than me, and that’s even if I include M Johnson the runner in my search. Look, he has his own Wikipedia entry, for goodness sake…
Sometimes I would console myself with the private thought that perhaps the work wasn’t scorchingly-brilliantly-incredible all of the time and then this Saks project turned up so that theory crumbled too. I even found myself smiling when I found a typo in his book, but my book had thousands of those on its first run and an embarrassing research error to boot, so that’s no good either.
But hang on, by some quiet detailed scouring of the small print, I’ve realised two important things. That a) he didn’t manage to set any of the book in Souvenir (talk about a wasted opportunity) and b) Michael Bierut is 7 years older than me. Yes! Hurrah! Finally, I have something on him. I’ve been playing this great news through my mind ever since. When I discovered it I turned to my wife and said – ‘if I haven’t got a book of writing out by the time I’m fifty will you shoot me?’ ‘Yes’, she said, with a strange look in her eye. Michael Johnson Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design is available now from Princeton Architectural Press
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03.08.07
Pigs really can fly
The weird and wonderful world of cyberspace never ceases to amaze. Having had our heads down preparing for the V&A fete and having posted our photos of the weekend, that, we thought, was pretty much that. It’s interesting to see when and whether ideas get picked up on the net, but it’s not that huge a deal to us. When one of our tecchies told us we were on the front page of del.icio.us a few weeks back to be honest we didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. Bear in mind this is a site where currently the hot hits include A LINUX SYSAD BLOG: 50 quick linux command tips part 3, and How To Turn mailing lists into an RSS feed. Must read those in a minute, eh? 
After our fete pics went up, our friend Armin (he of the Speak Up/Quipsologies empire) was quick to quip us (did we say that right? Think so). 
Then a period of calm. Then the undisputed queen of design blogging (well in our opinion anyway) picked up on the story, Swiss Miss. 
As suspected, the world, its wife and its stylist seems to be subscribed to Swiss Miss, so within hours we were on Not Cot, Boing Boing and Crib Candy. 
And from there, all over the world, Japan, Russia, you name it. 
Amazing, really. From pocket money presents at a village fete, a week later we have a shop brimming with enquiries and even tentative discussions about licensing the idea. Maybe this web thingummmyjig does work, after all.
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01.08.07
Fete Flickr
If you missed the V&A village fete or just fancy being nosy, Scarlet Projects have started a fete flickr here.
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