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29.01.08
Catch a Mouse
Johnson banks has just finished the first stages of work re-branding Microsoft’s digital advertising awards. The new name for the scheme is Mouse.
We suspected that there would be a way to ‘embed’ a mouse shape into the word, and after some experiments we found the solution. The colour scheme, pink ‘ear’ and the © symbol were all chosen to enhance the optical effect.
The scheme itself is a free-to-enter competition for all forms of digital advertising, with several cash prizes of thousands of Euros on offer. An added extra is that the winners are automatically entered into the Cannes CyberLions, free of charge. This suggested some copy-led applications that are beginning to be used on-line and will form the communications backbone of the launch. 
We’re also planning to use the ‘ear’ of the device as a separate element as and when it becomes appropriate. 
A bit like this...
Our thanks to Brand Guardians for their naming input, and if you want to enter (remember it’s free) the entry forms are here. There’s also a piece about the scheme in this week’s
Design Week.
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28.01.08
A website that somehow manages to link Autechre and Whitesnake
We followed a link last week to a treasure trove of band logos with great notes concerning who did what to which piece of type, why, and when.
Now we know that the Scissor Sisters’ guitarist created their sexually suggestive mnemonic, and that Autechre’s ‘a/e’ device was also created by the band themselves in a heavy kerning session. That Whitesnake’s snake was drawn by Jim Gibson in 1978. That Sisters of Mercy nicked their logo from a 19th century textbook. And that Aphex Twin’s highly influential amorphous monogram was started in 1991 by Paul ‘Terratag’ Nicholson. And that Van Halen’s iconic mark dates from 1978. 
All pretty essential stuff, we think you’ll agree. Our thanks to Neatorama for the link.
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23.01.08
A Non-Hierarchical Statement of Existence
As an antidote to our previous post, here’s an entertaining link sent to us by a Scottish friend. It’s basically an on-line petition that feels there is a more existential alternative to entering the Scottish Design Awards. ‘We don’t require designers from anywhere else in the UK (probably London) to approve, judge or rank our work’. Absolutely.
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20.01.08
The annual cocktail of fear and loathing
‘Is there any point in entering? Will it win?’
These are the words rumbling through the worlds’ creative directors heads, because, if you needed any reminding, it’s awards season.
The season when polyboard sales rocket, for one month only. The season of internal spats as teams lobby for pieces to be entered. The season of huge spikes of activity on company credit cards, for no discernable return.
Well, there must be a return, surely? But having been entering awards for years, and sipping this annual cocktail of fear and loathing (coupled with an increased dissatisfaction at the scale and cost) I’m beginning to wonder.
You’ve got to be pretty strong to resist the lure of the schemes now paraded in front of us. One London based magazine says it will award the prize of design company of the year to the company that gets the most entries into its scheme. That sounds fair enough but have a look at the small print and at £100 a pop, that’s quite a pricey way to get PR. And, you could argue, a dubious basis to make that kind of decision upon – the true ‘design company of the year’ may not have a spare £700 to enter all its best projects, after all.
Another London based magazine started its own awards table back in the nineties that tots up awards won and allocates points on a slightly schizophrenic basis, so that winning silver at the Art Directors Club of Guadalupe could actually win you a point in the scheme. And if you win best of show, well... I’m making light of this because we’ve never taken it that seriously, but I’m beginning to think I’m in a minority. As I filled out my forms for D&AD (still probably the scheme most would prefer to win) last week, I made the fatal error of letting my ‘5 good projects’ rule slip slightly and before I knew it I’d racked up a thousand pounds on entries. Ouch.
But then a few emails dribbled in from around town and I began to learn that several firms were spending many, many thousands just on single schemes. I’d heard the rumour years ago that one well-known London design firm had spent £8,000 entering D&AD one year – now it seems those days are back. To put things into perspective with our advertising cousins, I remember the pain of my bottom jaw hitting a boardroom table as I learnt that a major London advertising agency had an awards budget of nearly a quarter of a million pounds. They were grumbling that the recession of the time (2002) had meant a cut in the budget, down to a paltry one-hundred thousand. What a drag.
These eye-watering stats highlight the reality that in advertising, awards are big business. Getting your agency, or worldwide conglomerate, high up the tables in schemes like The Gunn Report, has become deadly serious. The agency gong of choice seems to be slowly switching to Cannes, where the Golden Lions seem to be gaining ground on the Yellow Pencils as a marker of creativity. As Cannes gets stronger, more clients get involved, so Cannes gets stronger still, and it all ratchets up from there.
You could see awards mania taking over in design as well. If some of the numbers I’ve heard about this week are true, then some London design firms must be spending well over 10k a year entering awards, and I could imagine that some are approaching the wage of a junior designer in money spent. And that’s before shelling out on the warm chardonnay, chicken kiev and the chance to sit next to the paper rep to discuss grammage and opacity.
Some designers are pretty honest about their flirtation with awards. Quentin Newark of Atelier Works admitted that they changed tack as regards awards a few years back – ‘from reluctant, intermittent entering, we switched to enthusiastic, comprehensive entering, and bits of paper started streaming in. Regional, typographic, Dutch and American awards were particularly prolific. Did we make anything of it? No. Do we do it now? No.’
Most design companies of any repute will have considered the idea of taking awards more seriously, but probably backed away due to the pain of entering and the ever-escalating costs.
The reason why some of the figures I’ve mentioned are getting into silly numbers is not because firms are actually doing 20 great projects a year, but because of a phenomenon known as ‘multi-entering’ (some people more cruelly use terms like ‘spray and prey’ or ‘blanket bombing’). This is a trick used by awards stalwarts, who, having produced a good project involving decent design, photography, writing and illustration will then merrily enter it into four different categories. The thinking behind this is that not every jury will hate it and it’s bound to impress someone, somewhere. And you can see the logic of this, I guess, but take your 5 best and start multi-entering and you can see how those numbers rack up.
I’ve seen this back-fire on people though – on one judging scheme we all arrived back for day two (to view shortlisted pieces) and discovered that three or four juries had put the same piece through. This made the juries feel manipulated, the piece was taken out of most of them and didn’t win.
But the discernable reason for all of this, and for this staggering spend, is that some people are seeing it as money well spent. Think about it – employing a decent PR firm will cost you at least 10k a year, but blanket bomb a magazine’s awards scheme with enough good entries and you’ll guarantee some column inches, maybe even an article, and that may ‘only’ cost you 2k. Blitz D&AD with entries and maybe garner a few nominations and you’ll get some peer respect. Enter some of those other ‘easy’ ones and you’ll pad out your year with some decent numbers (not forgetting that new scheme in Guadalupe). Win big and it’s show-time and you can stick ‘London’s most creative’ on your email sign-offs. Keep it up for three years and you’ll be ‘world’s most creative’ (although those techies at Apple might give you a run for your money). OK, so it may cost the salary of another designer, but what the heck.
You know what? I think I’d just prefer to employ another designer. Michael Johnson
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16.01.08
The bag’s nearly hit the fan
Apologies for the late notice but two of our product designs are currently exhibited in China at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, as part of an Eco-design exhibition. 
You’ll have to get a move on, it’s only open until the 19th. More information here. Sorry. 
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14.01.08
Oh no, the R-word index is back
Continuing on from last week’s economics theme, we’ve been enjoying The Economist’s recent forays into graphic and information design. In this this marvellous piece in December, they carefully explained how information design has been around much longer than you’d think. These diagrams were developed by Florence Nightingale (yes, that Florence Nightingale) to show that ‘far more soldiers died from infection than from wounds’ and wouldn’t be out of place in many 21st century annual reports. 
This diagram below was drawn in the middle of the 19th century by a French engineer who wanted to show, in the simplest of terms, how many of Napoleon’s soldiers set out (on the left) to conquer Russia (on the right), and how many returned. 
But it’s the return of one of The Economist’s hardly perennials, The R-word index, that’s got us worried. It’s a painfully simple diagram that simply adds up how many times two American newspapers include the word ‘recession’ in articles. You can use all the fancy modelling you like, but the R-word index neatly tracks the last two recessions perfectly. 
Oh look, it’s going up. Great. Hold on to your hats everyone.
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11.01.08
Last word on a recycled Christmas
We’ve had a remarkable amount of feedback about last year’s recycled Christmas tree card - much more than previous efforts, it must be said. Hugh Aldersey-Williams complained (with his tongue firmly in his cheek) that there was one small snag - ‘my card contained a tremendously exciting article about brand valuation. I was loving it, but then found I couldn’t get to the end to see what happened!’ We had noticed that (especially for the copies of Design Week that we punched) we could tailor the card by picking out relevant copies and headlines that suited the recipients. Adrian Shaughnessy, writing in this week’s Design Week noticed that we had specially sent him one featuring one of his columns (albeit cleaved in half by a metal cutter). He even nominates it for best Designer Christmas Card 2007 - we’re not sure if we should be proud of that or not, to be honest. In the same magazine Marksteen Adamson mentioned our card and suggested that ‘if everyone has just one idea each like that, 2008 will be a very lovely year’. We’re flattered, thank you. But now it’s back to some real work.
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09.01.08
How obscure Economic theories could help your design business
A craving for independence? A massage for your ego? Dealing with a massive overdraft? Or a chronic inability to agree with your boss what CD to play?
There are many reasons why a designer cuts loose from their last employer, and some of the above may be contributing factors, but usually they quit to do more of the ‘kind of work I really like to do’ and, by implication, less of that boring nonsense their boss is making them churn out.
Very few graphic designers find themselves happy implementing minor tweaks to a global accountancy conglomerate’s corporate ID. They’re drawn to small, highly creative projects that provide that drug-like cocktail of creativity and the search for the eureka moment. After the ‘hit’, it’s a slow downhill slide into creative cold-turkey until the next chance to score arises. Usually, the more ‘scores’ (and the least implementation) the better.
But is it possible to run a company on a diet of just highly creative, smaller projects? When johnson banks began, we were painfully aware that our existence, fiscally speaking, was probably due to a few well-meaning but essentially dull projects for blue-chips. Some of the work was OK, but if we’re honest, the big-payers bankrolled the rest of our (much more interesting) work. By the late nineties we’d let the blue-chips slip away and concentrated on large scale cultural projects which left us exposed to any of the larger clients drifting away. When they drifted, we panicked.
Essentially it took us a while to get the balance right. But what constitutes a good mix between the ‘money’ projects and the ‘creative’ projects is pretty difficult to ascertain. Perhaps an old economics adage, the Pareto principle, is a good rule of thumb. (The principle was named after the Italian economist Pareto who had noticed that 20% of the Italian population received 80% of the country’s income).
In basic business terms, the 80:20 rule translates as ‘80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients’, and has always seemed a pretty good rule of thumb – we’ll often be beavering away on 20 interesting projects but only a handful of them will pay really well.
80:20 often applies to studio quality too – many of the larger companies would grudgingly admit they’d only ever show anyone 20% of the work they do in any one year, the other four-fifths being hastily squirreled away onto back-up drives. More creative companies, conversely, might aim to have 80% of their annual output at a really high level, with only 20% of it dodgy.
We canvassed views from other designers to see if Pareto’s law applied to them, and interestingly the views are pretty mixed.
In theory, by setting up as just one man plus assistant, Stefan Sagmeister could have an especially high ‘nice to nasty’ ratio, but he admitted that this his ratio was about 50:50. Garrick Hamm at Williams Murray Hamm said his was more like 75:25. ‘I have a couple of projects that have turned out to be bummers – but we never bother taking anything on if it’s terrible from the start – it’s just not worth it. I’d rather sell my old D&AD’s’, he quips.
Within Pentagram’s New York office there were varied responses. Demonstrating an admirable ability to stretch the definition of what exactly constitutes 100%, Paula Scher revealed that ‘half of my work is “beautiful work”- no money. A quarter of my work is ordinary work for lots of money. A quarter of my work was supposed to be “beautiful work” and no money, but it turned out not to be beautiful, and a quarter of my work is pretty good work, for pretty good money’.
Only one person really had issue with the thesis at all, and that was Michael Bierut. He maintains that it has been years and years since he took on a project just for the money. ‘Every time I did do it, the money, no matter how much, was never enough in the end. So I stopped’ he says.
‘Of the projects I do these days, I make a decent profit on almost all my projects, big and small, even the ones for institutional or cultural clients. Small jobs pay less than big jobs. Small jobs provide the satisfaction of working fast and seeing a quick, sometimes disposable result; big projects can be grindingly dull but render outcomes that are more lasting. I also do some jobs for absolutely free when I think the cause is worthy. I do not repeat NOT take these on because I think I can get cool portfolio pieces out of them. In most cases, my freebies aren’t even particularly flashy pieces of design; they’re whatever I think is a responsible solution for the client at hand’.
From a business perspective, you can understand why some people running design companies might conclude from all of this that they should just go and chase those nice chunky-but-dull clients (the 80), and as long as there are a few little creative projects to keep the designer-johnnies happy (the 20). Then everyone will get paid, there will be cash left over for a decent xmas party and some nice new Aston Martins for the board directors.
And that would make business sense. Everyone knows that for a company to be seen as creative it only needs a handful of killer projects each year. Trouble is, within larger companies, the nice jobs get given to a sort of ‘A team’. This leads to resentment, people think they’re not getting the chance to do good work, people leave to do better work. Hang on a second, isn’t that where we came in?
Design-led companies probably end up back with Pareto – if they can catch a handful of big fish in any one year that will pay for all the fiddling and diddling they had planned for downtime in the summer. But this always seems to assume that big projects will always be dull. Perhaps the Bierut doctrine should hold – all projects should start from the same place, all should make at least a little profit, nothing should be taken on just on the promise of a good result.
It may be time to cut those big clients some slack and do some good work for them too, not just take their money. Now there’s a thought.
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04.01.08
Scissors, paper, resolutions
For our first thought of 2008, we thought we’d share with you a humble piece of Woolworths wrapping paper featuring the obligatory foiled snowflakes. Look closer and you’ll see that on the reverse is a really useful grid for lining up your presents, a bit like the grid on the back of sticky-back plastic. We were impressed by this - the whole roll only cost £1.50 but Woolies had gone to the trouble of printing the reverse with something genuinely useful. Anyway, back to the more serious issue of recording all the
johnson banks new year’s resolutions. In no particular order they are: Be happier Give up smoking on the 15th of January
Make full use of the leap year woman’s prerogative
‘it’s our turn to propose’ thingy Give a lecture about the history of music and graphic design illustrated with actual guitar playing Put up the magazine rack (oops done that) Drink less alcohol and improve ourselves by reading actual books (not just Metro) Go back to the gym Draw more and stop biting our nails Stop saying sorry so much
Learn to play electric slide Spend less time on Facebook and more time working
Learn to pole-dance Learn to sight-read music much, much quicker Get an office cat? Swim more and learn Dreamweaver Put our make-up on before we get to work Find a way to travel without destroying the planet Stop eating lunch on the Tube Take some of those useless blogs out of our RSS readers Stop slouching Learn to multi-task properly Find a way to write Thought for the Week and still
stay in business And of course, the hardy perennial Do better work
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