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27.11.08
The last word on barrels
We’ve had some very positive feedback on the barrel art project, so as a kind of coda here are some of the production shots we held back from the main posts. After this, that’s it. It’s over. We promise. Normal service will resume shortly. Here are some shots of the ‘12 years’ piece in construction. 
Here’s an interim shot of the hoops from outside the blacksmith’s studio. 
The barrel lid when just charred. 
Work in progress cutting the ‘Angel’s Share’ piece. 
The sand blasted staves laid out pre-construction for ‘15 years...’
There are also a few write-ups on-line: here on the Creative Review blog, and here on Design Boom. The pieces will be exhibited until the end of today at the Studio Warehouse Gallery in Glasgow. The Studio Warehouse is at 100 Eastvale Place, Glasgow G3 8QG, 12 – 5.00 pm (daily), open until 7pm (27th only), admission free. The history of the project is tracked in previous posts on Thought for the Week. The first recorded the initial distillery visit, the second looked at previous examples of barrel art, the third explored the brief, the fourth recorded early experiments as we waited for barrels, the fifth saw us pulling barrels apart. The sixth revealed some of our first ideas, the seventh showed the approved general idea, and two weeks ago we shared some of the work in progress pictures. Earlier this week we revealed the final pieces.
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25.11.08
Making art from barrels, part nine
We’re just back from Glasgow where our Barrel Art project has finally launched. In case you’re a new visitor to this site, the brief, in a nutshell, was to take a series of actual whisky barrels and find a way to express the vast lengths of time it takes to actually produce a bottle of Glenfiddich Single Malt. So here are the final pieces. As we revealed a week or so ago, the final idea is to use the barrels, or bits of barrel, to explain the ‘jobs’ that each part of the process has to do. So, for example, the 32 staves of a barrel have to guard the 15 year-old whisky for all that time. 
So we simply sand-blasted a suitable sentence out of the inside surface of the charred wooden staves.
For the 12 year-old whisky, we based the piece on a cross-section of a tree trunk. 
This became a vast piece, six foot in diameter, using the staves of about six barrels. It weighs about a quarter of a ton.
For the 18 year-old we featured the barrel hoops, re-engineered as an impossible double helix.
The next piece is based on the ‘Angel’s share’. Some blame evaporation for the drop in the level of the liquid over twenty years, others think it’s thirsty angels dropping in for a quick sip. So for this one, we created type out of wood that has been cut away, to symbolise the angel’s share.
As you walk around the piece it says ‘For 21 years we take a share’. The oldest whisky inspired the simplest design - for thirty years the liquid waits to be decanted. We used the charred insides of a barrel lid for this one, and simply wondered what 30 years of days and nights would look like. 
Here are some shots of the pieces on display in Glasgow. 
The pieces will be exhibited from today at the Studio Warehouse Gallery in Glasgow until the 27th November. There’s also extensive coverage of the work and background on the project on the Glenfiddich site. The Studio Warehouse is at 100 Eastvale Place,
Glasgow G3 8QG, 12 – 5.00 pm (daily), open until 7pm (27th only), admission free. If you’re interested, the history of the project is tracked in eight previous posts on Thought for the Week. The first recorded the initial distillery visit, the second looked at previous examples of barrel art, the third explored the brief, the fourth recorded early experiments as we waited for barrels, the fifth saw us pulling barrels apart. The sixth revealed some of our first ideas, the seventh showed the approved general idea, and two weeks ago we shared some of the work in progress pictures. Our thanks to our collaborators on this project, primarily Wesley West and his team for their faultless production, but also The Foundry for type assistance, Kevin Summers for some great shots and of course William Grant and their PR consultancy, Red, for asking us to get involved.
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22.11.08
More from Kuala Lumpur
Here are some pictures from the recent Kyoorius Designyatra in Kuala Lumpur. Here’s Wally Olins in full flow. 
Kenya Hara. 
Neville Brody relaxing on the front row. 
Vince Frost (or ‘anti Vince Frost’, technically). 
The book store. 
Andy Altmann from Why Not Associates, Kath Tudball from johnson banks, Aporva Baxi and Simon Dixon from Dixon Baxi. 
The end. 
Pictures by Kath Tudball, Johnny McGeorge and The Sun Daily.
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20.11.08
Campur Campur
One of the senior members of the johnson banks design team, Kath Tudball, was speaking at last week’s Kyoorius Designyatra conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her topic was the Malaysian concept of ‘campur-campur’, which roughly translates as mixed up, or mixed together. This seemed a logical choice of theme because she herself is a mix-up (of English and Malay parents), works at johnson banks (merrily mixing all types of design and nationalities together in a determinedly pluralist environment) and all of us seem to live in an increasingly mixed-up world.
Malaysia itself is a mixed up kind of place – Kath’s earliest memories were of a bizarre dessert known as ‘air batu campur’ which is made from mixed ice, green syrup, pink syrup, gula melaka (brown sugar), evaporated milk, palm seeds, beans, jelly, sweetcorn, cendol and nuts… 
Her teenage years were a contrast of suburban winters in Twickenham and summer holidays in the colourful chaos of Kuala Lumpur, surrounded by the mixed cultures, languages and food. 
After another campur-campur in the multi-cultural melting pot of Central Saint Martins, more blending came to fruition here at johnson banks. Here’s an early example: Parc de La Villete’s combination of parks, people, exhibitions and entertainment... 
...became a ‘grassworld’ where the grass of the park became symbolic objects for the year. 
Soon after, the same park became a mechanical garden, where the park’s famous architecture became the plants. 
Other projects at johnson banks happily throw cultures together: for this symbol of UK and Japanese collaboration the English letters are mixed with the Japanese characters for ‘Nihon’. 
An older johnson banks project for the British Council on language… 
…prompted an examination of a Malaysian linguistic trend known as Manglish. This is where English and Malay are literally squashed together in a bizarre mix that has developed naturally and organically. Some examples of Manglish are phrases like ‘where got’… 
…or ‘so action’. 
Both phrases sound absurd when read out of context but when you see their provenance, they make a kind of sense. Another great (but bizarre) example is ‘gostan’… 
The big question though, is whether campur campur is on the rise, or decline? Just a quick look around the globe reveals mash-ups in almost every part of life: Ashwariya Rai may have started in Bollywood but is now so well known she’s a face for L’Oreal worldwide. 
Nigerian/British artist Yinka Shonibare mixes traditional African textiles with western Victorian costume. 
And a certain Barack Hussein Obama’s a pretty high level campur campur, isn’t he? (The product of a Kenyan father and a white American mother). 
Even in identity design, we’re seeing high-level mash-ups and multiculturalism being celebrated, not covered up. Japanese retailer Uniqlo, whose name originated from the ‘Jinglish’ for unique clothing (yoo-nee-koo-roh), has now introduced the Japanese logo into its international stores, so the Japanese and western logos now co-exist. 
Are we going to see more or less campur campur? Or in Manglish: Campur Campur, CAN or NOT? It’s pretty obvious: CAN.
Kyoorius Designyatra Malaysia was held on the 13th and 14th of November. Other speakers included Wally Olins, Neville Brody, Vince Frost, Kenya Hara and Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates.
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17.11.08
Follow that sheep (part one)
Recently we tried to persuade the marketing director of a ‘luxury’ brand that, despite our lack of significant experience in their sector, we’d enter it with our eyes open, with fresh ideas, unencumbered by the received wisdom of the sector, etc etc etc.
It was no great surprise when we weren’t selected. Nor was it a bolt from the blue to hear that they had shortlisted some ‘luxury branding specialists’. In difficult times it’s a gamble to appoint people on strength of thought rather than proof of pudding, let’s be honest.
The trouble is, appointing puddings often just exacerbates the ‘me-too’ look that many sectors develop. Let’s take luxury branding as an example. Flick through a recent copy of Vogue with your hand over the logos (we call this the ‘thumb test’) and it’s virtually impossible to differentiate one brand from another. And they all use Kate Moss as a model, just to make it even more confusing.
Stack luxury logos up on a slide together and, well, letter-spaced capitals are pretty much the order of the day. 
But luxury isn’t the only area afflicted. After the ‘hiccup’ of the London 2012 logo, candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics have retreated to the safe havens of ribbons, stars, hands, people, rings and the Olympic colours.
If you were a visiting alien trying to decide which bit of earth to visit first you’d be forgiven for thinking that every country on earth was a riot of primary swatches populated entirely by jolly, colourful, excitable earthlings brandishing paintbrushes and giving away free hugs, beer or flowers at the airport. 
If you then got bored of the beach and fancied touring the world’s mass transit systems (well, you’re an alien on a scoping mission after all) you’d probably get your bus pass for one muddled with your carnet for another.
And if you decided to trade in your Martian dollars to invest in some of earth’s ‘global’ companies, you might find yourself struggling to differentiate them too. 
But these trends aren’t just restricted to style of logos - it applies to colours too. The majority of financial institutions use blue, or would like too. (The easiest presentation you’ll ever make is to stand in a British boardroom and say ‘well we’ve thought long and hard about this and we think the answer is to write your name in caps, in blue’). Established charities love red. New charities love green. Emergency and breakdown companies love ‘alert’ colours like yellow and orange.
Obviously there are some logical reasons for all these choices – brushstrokes (in theory) signify freedom and vitality, yellows and oranges stand-out in headlights (so make logical breakdown colours), red equals blood so can be a powerful colour for appeals and grabbing attention, and so on.
Sometimes an early, classic piece of work is so enduring that it defines the look of a sector, so the identity developed for La Caixa bank in the eighties (in conjunction with Juan Miro) seemed to encapsulate modern Spain and struck a chord in tourist offices everywhere. Soon paper collages were the ‘must-have’ style for their logos.
London Underground wrote the early visual code for transit systems at the beginning of the twentieth century. And then the post-war period that saw Canadian Railways, Japanese Railways and British Rail adopt ‘track’ based logotypes and symbols made the ideas open-source, for the world to adapt as their default setting.
For designers and thinkers trying to provide something new in these sectors, breaking through this pervasive, herd-thinking behaviour is hard to do. By definition, standing out from the crowd can attract ridicule, and risk. But the longer you see herd-thinking first hand, the harder it becomes to defend it.
Maybe it was fine to follow, once. But not any longer. This is the beginning of a series looking at how people and organisations try to break out of the mould, what succeeds, and what doesn’t. The images above are borrowed from a multitude of sources, and special thanks go to Brand New and Cicade dos Logos for the loan of some of the collections.
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13.11.08
What-o-Mundus?
Most designers will name a particular book that they keep boomeranging back to, a groundhog day tome that helps them through difficult times or 11th hour deadlines. Only a few weeks ago, British designer Mike Dempsey was sharing one of the books from his collection, ‘Dorfsman on CBS’, name checked only days later by Michael Bierut after Dorfsman’s recent death. At college, being introduced to Herbert Spencer’s Pioneer’s of Modern Typography was a breakthrough moment for me, as it had been a decade earlier for Peter Saville (although how I ever thought I was going to successfully recycle all those pages of woodblock constructivism with a Grant Enlarger and some Letraset is anyone’s guess). 
I worked with one designer whose copy of this book, The Dictionary of Graphic Images never left his side. Never.
How creatives use their ‘desert island’ design books varies – for some they just help to unlock frozen minds at critical points. Some great but perhaps overused books like ‘A Smile in the Mind’ can become resources to be mined indiscriminately. Of course, if you’re struggling with a brief on ‘seeing’ then perhaps the spread on ‘eyes’ from the graphic images dictionary will be useful...
...or the chapter on christmas cards from A Smile in the Mind, but you could argue that all you will be doing is adding (yet another) ‘eye’ solution or ‘rudolf’ gag to the canon rather than thinking of anything particularly original. 
But occasionally, watching what books people return to again and again is far from clichéd and genuinely instructive. I once worked with a very gifted art director in Australia whose typographic touchstone was very unusual. Hidden under his desk, in a special drawer, was a heavily thumbed, torn and ripped copy of Typo Mundus.
Typo Mundus, (or Typo Mundus 20, to give it its full title) was organised by the International Center for the Typographic Art who had an ‘an idea to preserve and document a collection of the most significant typography of the 20th century’. ‘An exhibition was conceived and the call for entries resulted in more than 10000 submissions from all parts of the world. A jury of 12 designers selected some 500 entries for inclusion in the book’. 
Ok, sounds fair enough, so why the fuss? Well, it dates from 1966. That’s one clue. Another clue? The judges, which included Anton Stankowski, Louis Dorfsman, Piet Zwart, Roger Excoffon and Herman Zapf. Blimey. And then there’s the work. It’s hard to think of another book where so much incredible work is so crammed together from typography’s glory period. Here are a few examples, picked pretty much at random.
Any designer even remotely interested in big, punchy sixties type should get hold of a copy, as soon as you can. For a book that’s 42 years old, it’s hard to beat, and my Australian colleague had good reason to treat it with such reverence. And yes, he did refer to the work, but he used it to push him to look for better ideas, not just as unknown reference to plunder indiscriminately. 
The good news? You can pick up copies on Abe for less than twenty dollars. The bad? I can only see six left.
By Michael Johnson.
(Update: sorry all the copies on Abe have gone)
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10.11.08
Making art from barrels, part eight
We’re straight into production on the barrel project. First thing to do is work out some of the technicalities. We want to embed words into the barrel pieces, so we’re testing different processes like etching... 
...or sand blasting. 
We’re determined to do something with the hoops, but that means being able to recreate perfect, rusty rivets. 
We’re collecting and cutting as many barrels as we can as we plan out a large piece that could use up to at least six barrels. 
We’re still trying to find a way to write on the insides of the barrel staves, but they are seriously charred, which could prove to be a problem. 
We’re also investigating if we can rebuild a barrel without the hoops on the outside, and how to stop it falling apart. 
We’ll post more of these when we have something working a little better. 
This is the latest in a series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’re tracking the project on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here, the fourth was here.
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05.11.08
Making art from barrels, part seven
After months of research, distillery trips, making test sculptures in polyboard, deconstructing real barrels and pursuing a few blind alleys, we’ve finally got an idea that works for our Glenfiddich project. We’ve been looking for a way to construct designs and art based on whisky barrels that somehow communicates the truly vast amount of time the alcohol spends in a cask (between twelve and thirty years). We finally had a bit of a breakthrough when we began to think of the elements of the barrel as having clear ‘jobs’ to do, for a clearly defined amount of time. So, for example, one single spring has supplied the water for Glenfiddich for over a hundred years. 
So perhaps we could arrange some barrel slats in this way, and etch, or cut a sentence into the side, such as ‘for 132 years our spring has been our single source’. As a thought we liked this - it follows the ‘time’ theme but lets us use the barrels and the distillery in a much more unusual way. As another example, we thought that the barrel ‘bungs’ had an interesting role, either to state how long they will act as gatekeeper... 
...or imagine what they would say once their barrels were opened. 
The 20 year old whisky spends 20 years in American oak casks, then it’s is finished off in rum casks (a sweeter flavour, or something like that) so we wondered if we could show that somehow. Perhaps like this... 
...or like this. 
The distillery still grows some of its own barley in the fields opposite. Maybe we could show that somehow, with side-etched slats? 
(In case it’s tricky to read it says ‘we still grow whisky in the fields by the distillery’). We’ve also been trying to think of a good way to use the barrel hoops: maybe as typography that we could build or weld, then display at the distillery itself? 
On a similar theme of using the distillery as a backdrop, we wondered what would happen if we stencilled onto the lids of the barrels that wait to be filled up again, to make a sentence, such as ‘we will wait our turn’. 
So. The good news is, the client really likes the idea. Of the dozen or so ideas we presented on this theme, we’ve decided on 5 to develop further into real ‘barrel art’. The ideas above, although we like them, are the rejects. Harsh, but true. It’s now full steam ahead to build our final five. This is part of a running series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’ve agreed to ‘log’ the project’s progress on Thought for the week.
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04.11.08
Good luck, world
One of the johnson banks team hails from Michigan, originally, and arrived with election cookies this morning. It’s true that Obama-fever has filtered into the studio. We're sporting Obama screen-savers... 
...we’re loving the Obama as Santos conspiracy theories. 
Neatorama made us laugh. 
As did the ‘Gum Election’. 
We’re even getting Obama spam. Quite groovy type, we thought.
Then we ate the cookies. 
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02.11.08
A drawing day at the museum
A few years ago I remember Dick Powell (he of Seymour Powell fame) telling me that one of the greatest memories he had of being a parent was going to the V&A musuem one day, en famille, sitting down in a line in one of the galleries with pencils and paper, drawing the sculptures. I remember being impressed, and also a little envious that he had children prepared to have a go at something quite so daunting.
You still see people doing this, occasionally, but it’s quite rare and takes courage to take a sketchbook into the midst of all that marble. But that’s exactly what the eldest Johnson (aged twelve) and I decided to do last Friday.
First of all, a quick stop at Green and Stone (London’s finest art shop) to stock up on paper and charcoal, then into battle in Albertopolis. 
It’s important to point out two things at this point: I’m not retelling this to make any dubious point about the Johnsons being great draughtsmen (which as you’ll see, is clearly untrue), or to claim any ‘superdad’ bragging rights. To be honest I’m only describing a few hours whiled away in Albertopolis because it was surprisingly great fun and one of the most challenging things I’ve done for ages. (It’s about 20 years since I was last in a life drawing class, I don’t know about you).
The funniest thing about this is that our drawings look nothing like the sculptures, neither do they look like each others. So here are our slightly dodgy warm-up drawings of Aimé-Jules Dalou’s terracotta bust of Eugenie Maria Wynne… 
…which frankly look nothing like the real thing. We put that down to beginner’s nerves. 
Yes, this bust of Pope Clement XIV by Christopher Hewetson is wearing a cap, but the younger Johnson chose to concentrate on his face, whilst Johnson the elder struggled with a profile.
Ok, they don’t look that great but it’s really, really hard. Bear in mind that you have hundreds of tourists walking past as you draw sneaking a peak – they don’t really say much but their silence is often deafening. 
Our last attempt was this rather beautiful, but pale, lady.
Again, we could easily have been drawing something entirely different. 
Even though our attempts are pretty hopeless, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Seriously. If you have kids, or nieces and nephews who like drawing, you have to give it a shot. The best (and cheapest) analogue day out I’ve had for ages. By Michael Johnson
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