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29.02.08
More children saved, on buses, leaflets and websites
A week or so ago we were talking about Wieden and Kennedy’s ad campaign that has begun to roll on the telly for Save the Children. This week the campaign has notched up a little further - we’ve designed a series of double-decker buses themed on UK child poverty, launched this week in Parliament Square with a series of volunteers sporting Alistair Darling masks (current UK Chancellor, in case you’re abroad and wondering...). 
We’ve also been working on a mass distribution leaflet for the charity, shown below. 
Because Save the Children are over 70 years old, it’s often difficult talking about their work now without referring to their work then, so this concertina leaflet is double ended. One side is devoted to past breakthroughs and the other to future aims and ambitions. 
There are many other campaigns and initiatives going on - the pick of the bunch is probably this immersive 360 degree website about their work in Kroo Bay, a slum built on a rubbish dump on the banks of the filthy ‘Crocodile River’ in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It features some great photographs and video by Anna Kari and Guilhem Alandry in a microsite built by Rufus Leonard. Well worth a look. 
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25.02.08
The redesigned Art Quarterly magazine
The eighth issue of the Art Fund’s quarterly magazine (AQ) is due out soon, and we thought this would be a good point to look at its house style that johnson banks has introduced over the last two years. The Art Fund is a membership organisation and charity consisting of over 80,000 art lovers. Its magazine is both a crucial way to keep in touch with members and a highly valued ‘perk’ of membership. The first step was to use the magazine’s in-house name - AQ - to signal a change in style with the mastheads. The AQ monogram can move from side to side, depending which suits the cover image best. For covers we’ve always concentrated on one single image - this is a subscription magazine so we don’t need copious coverlines to ‘sell’ each copy. Because the covers almost set the mood for each edition, we can take a few more risks than traditional magazines. Here are some of the covers over the first issues. 
Inside, the magazine has been redesigned completely. The main openers make full use of the unusual images supplied for the project, and the lightest weight of the Art Fund’s typeface family.
Other on-going johnson banks projects for the Art Fund include their 2008 Review and gallery installations for Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
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22.02.08
Blogging is hot. It’s official
British magazine Design Week’s annual Hot Fifty supplement is out this week. This is an annual piece that by the magazine’s own admission often features the same old names, you know, Apple, Audi, John Sorrell, yada yada.
But its selection jury usually crowbars in a few interesting things amongst the traditional back-slapping, such as Three Trees Don't Make a Forest venture, or the bizarrely named manufacturer of high-end sailing boats called Wally Yachts (yes, true). And in an interesting development, this year’s jury has even found a place in the fifty for blogging (albeit as a catch-all title). But hey, let’s not grumble, for a international design magazine to acknowledge the power of such pixel-based competition as Design Observer, more recent sites such as Creative Review’s blog and the likes of dezeen.com there’s obviously something afoot here. They even had space to mention Thought for the Week. It will be interesting to see when (or if) the catch-all title of ‘blogging’ gets forgotten and the sites themselves (rather than the phenomenon) are recognised in their own right.
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19.02.08
Trying to explain graphic design to a hall full of ten year olds
I once had to launch a book in Canada in front of 800 delegates knowing that the shipment of books hadn’t made it to the conference. Difficult. Recently I faced 1600 eager Indian designers whilst battling jet-lag, a crabby computer and stifling heat. Quite tricky.
But a couple of weeks ago I had to explain what graphic designers do to 300 ten-year old, low blood-sugar children. Definitely the trickiest yet. My standard response to nosy cabbies – that I design ‘logos, posters and stamps’ – simply wasn’t going to work. Try to talk about logos to kids for longer than 90 seconds and their attention waivers almost immediately.
My plan was to warm them up gently, by talking about the design that was all around them and all the different types of designers there are. So we talked about how the union jack ‘design’ had come about, and how computers had changed from towers of cogs to candy coloured plastic (with the help of galloping technology and some clever product designers). 
They then got very animated talking about designing cars (and specifically James Bond’s car). I was going to talk about Hitler and the ‘people’s wagon’ but realised that the headmistress was there so I became careful about being too subversive. 
Having given them the choice between designing flags, or cars and iPods, I realised I’d just converted 300 children to product, not graphic, design. That wasn’t the plan at all. I tried another tack –‘Look’, I said, ‘a clever man called Harry Beck solved this messy riddle…
…with this! It’s probably the most famous map in the world!’
Stony faces.
Their faces lit up much more when I showed them American trains before and after industrial designers got their hands on them.
Then they looked amazed to see Sant’Elia’s drawings from almost a hundred years ago, and how his ideas then affected buildings now. On a straw poll, nearly three-quarters of Clapham’s tweenagers would rather live in Corbusier’s Villa Savoie than a tedious suburban house (thank goodness). 
But it was products that got them really talking again as they considered that someone somewhere had designed the zip, the wind-up radio, and realised that kettles could indeed be cordless. 
The time had come to come clean about 2d design, so I showed them Olympic symbols, and we tried to guess who these belonged to. And yes, we did have a vote on that logo. 4-1, against. (Sorry).
But what really saved it for me, what really turned it, was that old stand-by, the FedEx logo. Lindon Leader’s canny use of white space really saved my bacon. The hall erupted with ooh’s and aaah’s as little fingers pointed out the arrow…
I had them. They had moved to the flat side. 
From there it was easy. I admitted to them that as a teenager I’d toyed with architecture (probably because of Metropolis and Blade Runner) but scary old tv titles, cigarette ads in 70s supplements and old books on Cassandre turned me into what I am now.
Then I finally showed them some work. They seemed to like it. Some of it even got ooh’s and aah’s of its own.
We talked about saving the planet, and talked about fossilised nappies for a while (although some bright spark pointed out ‘that’s an ammonite actually sir’ after I’d mistakenly called it something completely different. Oops). 
Knowing they’d ask, I decided to end with the bad and the good of being a designer. The bad? Well, it’s difficult to make that much money, it’s hard work and there’s quite a bit of competition.
The good? Well, most designers seem to love being paid to do their hobby, get to use up-to-date computers and can put their feet up saying ‘I’m just thinking’ (or play their guitar) whilst pretending to have ideas. Sometimes really famous designers get some recognition, but as a general rule it means no more exams, it’s not boring and you don’t have to wear a suit. (Quite a powerful case, I thought).
And when asked to vote, well over half of the hall voted to be a graphic designer. Not bad. (It would have been more if I hadn’t admitted the money’s not great, I reckon).
The most embarrassing bit? Forgetting that 10 year olds will titter at images of naked men and women (I was trying to explain how an art charity worked, with the help of The Rokeby Venus, Michaelangelo and The Three Graces). The best bit? When I put up some Cassandre posters, I half-heartedly asked if anyone knew who designed them. A little hand went up. I gulped – a ten-year old with a penchant for Deco graphics? Unheard of! There’s a child star in our midst, I thought. ‘It’s designed by Lee Harvey sir’ said our prodigy. 
I have to admit that I was momentarily lost for words. Lee Harvey? Who he? The I realised that my brave art history candidate had simply looked at the base of the poster and thought he had seen the name of the designer... By Michael Johnson
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18.02.08
They were flexible in the fifties too
Last year we wrote a post on flexible identity design that seemed to strike a chord in the design world. One of our earliest examples was this marvellous project in the seventies for Boston’s WGBH TV. 
We’ve received many emails since with other nominations to be included in the flexible hall of fame, such as Bruce Mau’s interesting scheme for the NAI in the early nineties, but now we have an interesting addition to the canon from much, much earlier. Jon Hewitt, writing on Speak Up, has pointed out the scheme that Karl Gerstner did for Boîte à musique, a Basel record shop, in 1959. Very interesting - who’d have thought that one of the doyennes of the Swiss style could be quite so open to change. 
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15.02.08
The brand new mouse that roared
There’s an entertaining discussion in progress about our recent Mouse identity on the American identity discussion site, Brand New. American bloggers don’t hold back from speaking their mind, so this kind of thing fills us with a degree of trepidation, it’s true. But so far, the Mouse seems to be doing quite well. If you scroll down there are some truly hilarious comments, and some classic suggestions on how we should re-design it. We think we’ll let the identity bed down a bit first actually, thanks.
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14.02.08
We looked, we feeled
Whilst we’re on the subject of catching up, there’s an interesting piece on Design Observer this week by Adrian Shaughnessy about that strange phrase ‘Look and Feel’. Johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson is asked his opinion. "I think when you succumb to 'look and feel' you're only a hop and a skip away from mood boards, and that really is the end of design as we know it".
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13.02.08
Save the Children, in The Guardian, on the telly
Apologies again for the radio silence, we believe (note the use of italics) that the gremlins in our system have been fixed now.
One of things that happened to this week: Wieden and Kennedy London’s above-the-line campaign for Save the Children launched on TV, the beginnings of the biggest global campaign the charity has ever run.
You can read more about it in the Media Guardian here. Stills of one of the ads are below. 
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06.02.08
The Avalanche
Apologies for the lack of thoughts, but a server crash has hampered us for a week or so. And we’re still recovering from what we’ve started to call ‘the avalanche’, when a wall of shelves full to the brim with archive work and all manner of design company detritus decide to throw itself off the wall in a desperate bid to be looked at once more. Messy. Really messy.
Obviously this was a bit of a blow for the wood type collection, once carefully sorted and collected into trays, now residing in plastic buckets. But in some respects a useful excuse to throw away yet more of those brochures we’d collected for no apparent reason. 
The further we dug into the debris the more interesting stuff we found. These strange looking folders, for example – these were our main mechanism for presenting work, pre-computer, before affordable, portable projectors. And inside, a whole series of old sleeves crammed with old work, mostly of a derisory standard.
But sprinkled amongst the dross were some really interesting old, forgotten ideas that we thought we’d share.
How about this, a logo designed for London football club Queens Park Rangers (QPR) in the early nineties that never saw the light of day. It still looks alright to us – maybe we should email it over to QPR’s new and rather cosmopolitan directors. (QPR has recently been taken over by Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mittal. They probably have a few bob to spare).
In case you’re wondering, the ‘R’s’ logo currently looks like this. Now, we know football clubs love their history, but really... 
We found strange things like these unused concepts for the British Council, from the late nineties – we were trying to persuade them that everything in their network of 900 classrooms worldwide should be labelled, in English, to act as teaching prompts. So the teachers’ shirts would be named, table tops and chairs inlaid with typographic veneers, cutlery engraved… well, you get the idea.
We also found some British Council thoughts that never made the cut – we did eventually do dozens of teaching posters on the intricacies of the English language, but oddly these ideas to explain ‘phrasal verbs’ never made the cut. Shame. 
We think this was a scribble for the UK sector of the dome – remember that? Pretty ropey really. 
This is really old and dates back to the 80s – part of a photoshoot illustrating what a student might do with £30 (the bribe then offered by NatWest Bank to new recruits clutching grant cheques). Somehow we’d decided that £30 could be spent sending 23 valentines (cards and postage was obviously cheaper then). And there was a reason why the metal heart couldn't be pierced but we’ve forgotten what it was.
This is an interesting memory – part of a whole body of work suggested (but unused) by an organisation lobbying for Britain’s role IN Europe (not out), hence the typographic trickery.
We’d completely forgotten about this - an annual report for Colombia. The country. We were so worried about whether we should do it or not, we phoned the Foreign Office who said ‘it’s fine’. Less than a year after it was printed the President was accused of corruption. Great. Still, it’s not every day you do a layout with Garcia Marquez in it.
The cause of the avalanche of work? Our builder, who had decided that there was no real need to attach the top shelf to the wall, they would just sort of hang there by themselves. A theory that proved a little flawed. It was nice to discover some old-and-forgottens. But now it’s time to find a new builder (and sort out that wood type). Oh, and maybe find a more reliable server too.
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