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28.09.07
More things to make you go ‘mmmm...’
As ardent Guardian readers we were disturbed by a slightly fawning piece this week about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘new’ map where ‘warriors, villains, fools and heroes get their own lines’. 
It’s nicely done. And look, you can buy the t-shirt, and a poster, and a bag... 
The only problem, apart from the fact that we see variations of this gag about 30 times a year in student portfolios, is that it seems way too close to comfort (for us at least) to Turner prize nominated artist Simon Patterson’s masterpiece, The Great Bear, from 1992. 
Patterson meticulously created lines devoted to engineers, philosophers, italian artists and even created a comedians line. He carefully made his intersections function by using the likes of Kirk Douglas on both the Hollywood and Artist lines. Genius. We can only hope that the RSC (and their designer, Kit Grover) asked him to consult on their idea.
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26.09.07
The hidden, the obscure and the unexplained
I was reading recently that Jack White trained as an upholsterer prior to worldwide fame as one half of the White Stripes. Much of the interview contained the obligatory rock musings, but what really stood out was White’s fondness for hiding poetry upholstered inside any particular chair he was working on at any time. Just imagine, some big American bottom somewhere is sitting on a first draft of ‘Seven nation army’. Bizarre.
It struck me as an extraordinary thing to do, to create, then to hide. Obviously in the design business we’re generally trained to communicate, and quickly. It’s virtually impossible for me to think of anything I’ve designed in the last 15 years that wasn’t intended to explain itself in some way, as fast as possible.
That doesn’t mean to say that design is free from the obscure, or the unexplained. One classic example is the pack for Lyle’s golden syrup, featuring a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of bees. Apparently this is a biblical reference (obviously an allegory much discussed in the Johnson family as we drip the golden goo onto our pancakes). It’s remained on the tin for over a century, seemingly oblivious to those who would enhance it with their 3d Photoshop filters and a couple of shadows (or maybe both). 
History seems to help some of the odder designs that surround us. Spend any time at all in Italy and you’ll spot Agip’s petrol station dog, and wonder about its meaning. What you may not spot is that said fire-breathing dog has 6 legs. True.
It apparently came about after a poster design competition in 1952 when the winning design was selected to be the symbol. It’s alleged that its real designer entered under a pseudonym and died before being discovered, never having to offer up an explanation for his creation. Popular theories are either that the dog is Wagnerian in origin, or based on Greek or African mythology. The official explanation at the time was that four of the six legs represent the car, the other two its driver. Obviously.
What’s clear is that Agip’s dog remains fantastically memorable, so hang the consequences and put those ‘fire and petrol don’t mix’ reports from health and safety back on the cupboard please. Of course if you walked into a modern design presentation with a packaging idea based around a dead lion surrounded by bees or a six-legged fire-breathing canine, you’d be swiftly shown the door, or locked up. But there was a trend some time ago towards ‘invention of tradition’, so perhaps this kind of approach will eventually come full-circle? Some symbolic solutions remain forever a mystery to their users. How many yummy-mummy’s on the school run have ever paused to contemplate that the three prongs of the Mercedes symbol on their bonnet reflect Gottlieb Daimler’s desire to show the aptitude of his motors to land, sea or air? How long did it take the fact that NatWest’s symbol is technically a diagram of the merging of three banks (the National Provincial, the Westminster and the District) to become irrelevant? Both have become simple visual shorthand for their organisations, their true meaning almost completely irrelevant. 
Do Toblerone eaters see the swiss symbol of the Bern bear when they guzzle their triangles? Do CND marchers discuss the precedents of their flags (the semaphore for the ‘N’ and ‘D’ of Nuclear and Disarmament)? I suspect not. 
Modern designers still can’t resist the occasional bit of sleight of hand. The much discussed FedEx logo only reveals its hidden arrow to about half of its viewers.
I’m sure 99.9% of people see the smile, or the arrow in Amazon’s logo, but how many get the reference of ‘from A to Z’? Both of these organisations have chosen to leave these as devices to be discovered, not plastered on 96 sheets on your local highway. The designers of the Amazon logo, Turner Duckworth, have experimented in sleight of hand before – this stamp design from 1997 doesn’t give away its secret too quickly until you see the face of the Spitfire’s designer (Mitchell) in the clouds behind the plane. 
Our unwillingness to unpick corporate symbolism means that some corporations can play fast and loose with their identities with no apparent change in their fortunes. BT’s adoption of a one-footed piper ruffled a few feathers due to its hefty implementation bill (allegedly 60 million pounds) but few seemed to pick up on the idea that it symbolised one person listening and another speaking. (In fact more time seemed to be spent alleging that the red bit of the pipers body is actually a snake – look closer and you’ll see it). The ‘listening/speaking’ idea was briefly animated into end-frames but hastily shelved by the ad agencies keen to relegate the logo back to a simple end-frame. 
The grandest conceit happened only recently, when the proposed logo for BT’s ill-fated international arm, Concert (a ‘C’ made up of coloured spinning discs) was simply recycled and shipped in to replace the piper. So what started as a ‘C’ logo ended us as a sort of ‘world’ blob, and the truly awful bit (that out-of-balance typography) remained unchanged. Shame.
Even trained professionals can miss some of these ideas. Many art directors would have enjoyed the historical pastiche of these recent Peeterman ads for Stella, but remained oblivious to the hidden USP, that the beer’s alcoholic strength (4%) is typographically buried into every application.
None of these designs would be seen as failures, many would be heralded as successes. The ‘aha’ factor when a consumer ‘gets’ the hidden message might well work in a design’s favour – they’ve managed to unlock the code and give themselves a psychological pat on the back by doing so.
And perhaps eat more Toblerone, send more Fedex parcels, order more books on Amazon and drink more of that beer. Yes, perhaps.
By Michael Johnson
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19.09.07
45 years of annual covers
If D&AD had the chance to rewind back through its history it might have approached things differently.
The Gold Award, for example, might have been gold. The Silver Award, silver, little things like that. And the yearly task of producing the D&AD Annual cover? That could have been much simpler. Maybe a blow-up of the year’s killer project, or a big bit of type on a colour, with just the date changing, year after year.
But no, that’s not the way it happened. A little haphazardly at first, but now officially, designing the annual cover has become a kind of award in itself. It’s become a Presidential duty; handing the baton to a perspiring creative who knows only too well that the arrival of the new annual is subjected to fierce critiques in studios the world over.
The brief was once to do ‘whatever you want’. It started perfectly simply. The cover for the pamphlet for the first exhibition featured the black portfolio that Alan Fletcher had used only a few years before when hawking his work around America. The newly designed logo was placed on the handle, the shot was taken. Thank you very much, go home. 
The first actual annual cover looked like this. Something to do with picking the reddest apple, I presume?
Sadly for much of the rest of the sixties, the covers weren’t much to shout about until Bob Gill’s 1968 pastiche of soap powder vernacular, an early example of designers poking fun at the scheme’s tendency to take itself a little too seriously. 
But as art directors struggled with painful metaphors to sum up the scheme (we’ve ‘bitten the dangling carrot’, and hit ourselves on the head with a self abusing hammer), some merrily took the loose brief to heart. When briefed ‘do whatever he wanted’ Tony Meeuwissen’s reaction in 1973 was to draw an illustration of, well, whatever he wanted. At the time an avid ephemera collector, he developed a visual mélange of a matchbox, a monkey, a ship, a lighthouse, a seagull and mice. Obviously.
Incidentally, the carrot cover is reputed to be the worst selling D&AD annual of all time - legend has it that 500 copies were sold then the remainder stayed in a warehouse until pulped. If you have a copy, look after it.
The finest ‘expression of the time and hang the consequences’ must go to pop artist Allen Jones’ 1972 offering of an archetypically pneumatic girl admiring herself in a yellow glowing mirror. For probably the first time (but definitely not the last), we see D&AD holding a mirror to some of the creative community’s attitudes of the time. 
Finally, however, someone cracked. It’s true, 13 years after the scheme’s inception, an art director put a pencil on the cover (in this case his own, hard-fought-for black one because D&AD towers wouldn’t lend him one) with 13 vicious little notches carved out of one edge. Neil Godfrey, the cover’s designer, had in one fell swoop amended the brief for decades to come, by finally including the organization’s most famous prize.
Once the floodgates had opened, for 25 years much of the action focused on the scheme’s wooden ambassador. We’ve had pencil sharpeners (twice), pencils as mountain ranges, pencils as honeycombs (with attendant bees), pencils sawn in half (revealing the scheme’s age in rings), pencils as medallion ribbons, a pencil case, a pencil box, swarms of flying pencils, even pencils as rockets (OK, I made the last one up but it wouldn’t have surprised you, would it?).
Some designers have chosen to make the winning of the pencil the idea itself – Trickett & Webb’s 1978 cover is simply a crowing cockerel – that year’s award winners waking to their golden sunrise, perhaps? Apparently, to crow correctly and raise himself to the right height for the meticulously prepared painted background (this is pre-computer, remember; it had to be done ‘in-camera’) our feathered lothario had to be surrounded by the fluffiest and horniest of hens. 
Farrow Design’s brief coincided with a President who wanted a book more like a product – enter, stage left a generous sponsor keen to help produce a steel slipcase. But it’s under the steel that the best idea lies; 17,107 tiny pin pricks cover the surface (representing that year’s total entries) of which 36 are silver, and one gold, the brutal statistics of the world’s toughest award scheme meticulously brought to life.
Malcolm Gaskin’s marvellous 1984 ‘blow-up’ cover included a valve that allowed the blind embossed, heat sealed, translucent dust jacket to be inflated, so the purchaser could at least play with their own air-filled friend (perhaps in the absence of the real thing?). Little did unwitting inflators know, the jacket had a non-return valve – once inflated, it stayed that way. This dust jacket also tended to be stolen, so many creatives went through college thinking of this cover as ‘the one with the boring yellow printed cover’, not realising what they had been missing.
My copy of Gaskin’s idea may be starting to show its age, but it was still healthy enough a decade ago to inspire me to think that perhaps replacing the cover itself with yellow pencil case material would work. It was only a hop and a skip to the brown cloth and zip that completed the transformation (but only when we discovered that the printer had found some yellow souwester material did we know it would actually go through). 
Sometimes, the core colours of D&AD have been enough – in 1981 Minale Tattersfield simply superimposed two pantone colour chips and that was enough to say ‘D&AD’ – an early example of how the organisation’s colours had become ingrained in the collective psyche of the then UK’s, and now world’s, creative community. 
In 1996 Tony Kaye only had to place the thinnest of yellow slivers behind the forbidding blank white page of an unused pad to sum up the feelings of many starting a new project – ‘Will this be the one that wins? Am I good enough? Help!’ By 2002, Gregory Bonner Hale simply created a ‘duster jacket’ from acres of yellow duster material (with the help of a Bangladeshi T-shirt manufacturer) and it was still pretty clear whose book this was on the bookshelves of the world.
Give that many nickname the annual ‘The Book’, it’s unsurprising that some cover designers have picked up on the Bible analogy, some more successfully than others. (A bible cover composed of two pencils as a cross famously failed to get through the committee once). In 1985 Roger Pearce placed a few simple lines of gold embossed capitals onto maroon leatherette, a subtle piece of anti-packaging for many people’s bible of creative thinking. And actually one of my personal favourites, but I’m forever being asked what the ‘real’ cover was, because people assume there was once a dust jacket that had either got lost or been discarded (missing the point entirely). 
Mother’s 2002 entry to the annual cover hall of fame took Pearce’s idea one stage further by creating a journey into the bizarre, not for D&AD but its Victorian cousin, Dulverton & Asquith-Drake. Just to confuse potential purchasers even more, we were told these are ‘the unfortunate findings of the collective for the abolition of reason’ on the spine. Time has dulled the effect of this, but this annual still takes the prize for the most imaginative jury photos, meticulously comped onto old victorian snapshots.
Mother’s side-stepping of the brief reveals one of the new difficulties of this project – designing the cover gets progressively harder and harder. Today’s recipient of the cover brief is now expected to produce something that shows what a modern, more grown-up, enter-on-line D&AD stands for, booms out of bookshelves and becomes an instant talking point. I’m not sure that some of the old ones would have stood up to that kind of scrutiny (but then that’s probably part of their pre-strategy, pre-marketing charm, isn’t it?). The last few years have seen varying attempts to deal with this. Sometimes a president’s agenda has to be dealt with - Spin’s reaction to a ‘charity’ brief in 2005 was to produce an annual in plain book boards with arty ‘day in the life’ images for dividers. 
Nick Crosbie was a late stand-in for Jonathan Ive (whose idea proved un-doable), but Crosbie’s sucker cover certainly sticks in the memory, as well as to every desk it ever gets put on. 
More recently, D&AD has been experimenting with non-London creatives, firstly Design Project from the north of England and this year Fabrica, who designed the much discussed ‘flag’ route. Time will tell whether the flags will endure but Fabrica certainly get the chutzpah prize by managing to print their credit on the front cover of the annual. Sneaky. 
My sources tell me that the designer of the 2008 annual has already been chosen, so good luck to them. As a very well known US based designer quipped to me once (having refused the invitation to design it), he couldn’t see the point in ‘doing something that had been done well 40 times already’. And he had a point. Mind you, that won’t stop London’s pushy creatives emailing Garrick Hamm, president elect, and suggesting themselves as recipients of the yellow baton for 2009. By Michael Johnson This is an update of a piece originally published to coincide with the Rewind project that celebrated the organisation’s 40th birthday.
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13.09.07
India week, continued
Rounding off what’s become India week, there’s an interesting write-up of the Kyoorius Designyatra conference on the Creative Review blog. We really hope they didn’t mean us when they accuse some of the talks of being ‘patronising, or even verging on the colonial’.
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12.09.07
It’s a quarter to Taj Mahal
We’ve always been of the view that listening to designers banging on about how they great they are on stage is an inherently dull experience. So we’ll often include examples of projects that went horribly wrong, or, when on international duty, we’ll adapt some of our old projects to the country we’re in. So this weekend we showed this adaptation of our British Council clock, re-engineered for India. 
In case you’re wondering, the rationale is below 1. Jawaharlal Nehru (First prime-minister of independent India)
2. Mahatma Gandhi (born on 2nd Oct 1869, 2nd of Oct now a national holiday)
3. The flag (three strips)
4. The four main religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism)
5. The Beatles in India with the Maharishi
6. Mangoes (national fruit)
7. Pratibha Patil (first female president. Appointed ’07)
8. Eight hockey sticks to represent the eight gold Olympic medals India has won
9. Lotus is the national flower - nine petals
10. Tendulkar (the cricket legend) wears the no.10 shirt
11. Indian tea
12. The Taj Mahal We’re not sure about 6 and 11, so any suggestions gratefully received. It got a round of applause, but that may have been because it was near the end, and the audience wanted it to end soon. The original is below. 
You’d be amazed at how often people ask ‘why is Henry the 8th at six?’
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10.09.07
Billboards like you’ve never seen before
So you’re thundering down some leafy Indian highway with a cab driver seemingly intent on a) beeping furiously at everyone and everything b) nearly running over all the people, dogs and cows on the road and your first thoughts are entirely on self-preservation (and getting your heart rate down to a more manageable level). After you’ve started breathing more normally, you start to notice the ads on the side of the roads. Actually, what you notice first is not the billboards themselves but the empty ones featuring huge hand written phone numbers (presumably advertising the person you should call to put up your ad). 
Then you start to notice ones that are either empty (and rather beautiful)... 
..or, best of all, the blank billboards that have been recycled from older ones, where the old phone numbers get all jumbled together. 
Completely accidental typography, but completely wonderful. You almost feel like paying for someone not to put something over these. Even the backs look fantastic. 
Photos by Michael Johnson and Harry Pearce.
Assistance, scouting and reconnaissance, Neville Brody
and Simon Sankaraya.
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09.09.07
Designers, printing, money
Johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson has been in India this weekend at the Kyoorius Design Yatra conference, where 1600 of India’s designers and students attended a 3 day festival of talks and discussions.
The conference organisers produced a vast array of literature to mark the occasion, including their own currency featuring the speakers. True. Here’s a small selection. 
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05.09.07
Spot the logo
It doesn’t seem to be cool to design logos. Spend any time at any student show and you’ll see viral ads, YouTube stings, type animations, blind-embossed handmade books, animated hand made type blind-embossed onto YouTube stings, you name it really. But you’ll search high and low for a student fresh out of college who seems interested in logos. In fact you’ll struggle to spot a logo, full-stop. This has always struck me as a bit odd. Whilst some parts of graphic design fluctuate in fortune (most notably the last decade’s shift from print to pixels), branding still remains. Companies, institutions, organisations, cities, charities, even countries need brands, and brands need logos (most of the time). And we can discuss flexible identity until we’re blue in the face but at the end of the day the client will nearly always ask ‘where’s the black and white logo then?’ So it’s perplexing that students don’t study it and courses don’t teach it. If they do they’re perpetually locked in some 80s pun/gag/wit/whimsy/self-perpetuating loop of recycled ideas that does more harm than good. Maybe it really isn’t cool. Maybe they don’t care. But if I pointed out that branding is the only sector impervious to the ebbs and flows of the market, they’d soon change their minds when they see jobs at the end of it. Perhaps you can blame some of this on publishers - a sector seemingly falling over itself to produce endless vanity monographs or ‘ten thousand ways to use uncoated paper’ style how-to books. But if you wanted to bulk out your logo shelf, pickings have been slim. Phaidon’s Marks of Excellence must have seemed like a good idea in the editorial meeting but gathers dust on the shelves. The los/dos/tres/whatever logos series is chronically hampered by an obsession with fashion graphics, not logos that last. For practising designers, an up-to-date collection has been missing, if only to check that the idea on your screen hasn’t been done before (a serious issue in an increasingly litigious climate). Luckily Laurence King have seen this gap in the market and have commissioned Logo by Michael Evamy. A nice, thick, objective, sort-of-scientific tome, full of up-to-date work (as well a good smattering of the obligatory classics). Most of the logos are subjected to the black and white test, and most of them survive. Sure, the selections are a bit UK/USA-centric, but with a UK based editorial and design team that was inevitable, and probably reflects the vast proportion of intended sales. There’s a bit of a bias towards the younger, groovier UK outfits, but again, not such a bad thing. I’m sure there’s some great ID work being done in Asia, but there’s not that much here. But this, to be fair, is a minor quibble – most of the good logos you’ve seen over the last twenty years have made the cut. Not many dodgy ones. Not too much filler. 
I wonder if too many design books have been produced recently with an ‘invite 1,000 designers to contribute then they’ll have to buy the book’ subtext, but here the editorial hand seems to have been much firmer. It’s rare for these types of books to feature multiple selections from one company, but just a quick scan of the index shows that Evamy had no reservations about asking Chermayeff and Geismar for just about everything they’ve ever done, and sure enough 40 or so of them of them are recorded here. That’s fair enough – great identity design shouldn’t be limited to some absurd ‘3 projects per company’ rule, or suchlike. The books designer’s, Spin, have avoided the temptation to cram the book with their work, which was the right decision, since any whiff of vanity publishing immediately devalues the gravitas of a book like this. (Incidentally the kings of the ‘PR by stealth’ approach remain The Partners who managed to cram about 50 of their own projects into A smile in the mind. Remarkable.) 
Some of the logos are produced in colour, but not many. I thought that might limit the books appeal, but it makes you concentrates on the logos’ form. The sections, as ever with books like this, are a little arbitrary and end up clumping similar logos together. This does make for some interesting juxtapositions, and adds to the entertainment value, that’s for sure. You’re certain to spot similarities. You may even spot things that are remarkably close to things you’ve thought of, or done. In my case, some old ‘bottom-drawer’ ideas that could have re-surfaced can now be ripped up because someone (usually Chermayeff and Geismar) has got there already. Damn them. The book doesn’t seem to have any major ambitions to unpick the strategic groundwork that will have preceded many of the more recent projects, other than some carefully worded, accurate and often insightful captions. On balance, that’s probably the right decision: if student designers are ever going to enjoy this end of the business they need to be greatly excited by great work, and quickly. Not bogged down in tedious strategic discussions, however important they may have become - we’ll leave the news that these kind of projects sometimes take 2 years to complete for another day, I think. Perhaps nothing can make logo design cool again? Who knows. But in its rarified, nu-swiss, old-Graphis-annual sort of way, this may well be the book to do it. 
By Michael Johnson Logo by Michael Evamy is available now through Laurence King, priced £19.95
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03.09.07
No useful reason at all?
It seems we’re not the only ones querying D&AD’s flag project, which we discussed last week. Ex-president Mike Dempsey filed this as his submission. Ouch. 
There are more pictures on the Creative Review blog.
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02.09.07
The Guardian’s top 50 designers
Johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson, was featured in yesterday’s Guardian Weekend magazine amongst their selection of the UK’s top 50 designers. The list, compiled by a panel including Emily Campbell, Alice Rawsthorn and Max Fraser included the likes of product designers Tom Dixon, Jonathan Ive, all-round wizard Thomas Heatherwick and living legends Derek Birdsall and Lucienne Day. 
The full list can be found here. According to the Guardian, Johnson’s ‘...Beatles album cover stamps even made philately cool’. 
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01.09.07
The BFI in Trafalgar Square
One of the johnson banks team was on hand to record a great collaboration on Thursday night in Trafalgar Square.
10,000 people watched a free screening of the BFI’s new digital restoration of the silent epic A Throw of dice, based on an episode from the Mahabharata, featuring thousands of extras and an array of elephants and tigers. As the movie was played, Nitin Sawhney performed a new score with the help of the London Symphony Orchestra.
The shaky stills don’t really do it justice, but our representative said it was fantastic. 
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