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28.04.08
Interesting 2008
By the time last year’s Interesting 2007 conference had actually happened, we wished we’d gone. So this year, in a calculated effort to physically ensure a ticket, johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson will be speaking at Interesting 2008.
In case you don’t know about Interesting, it was set up by über-planner/blogger Russell Davies with the main pre-requisite that speakers should talk about something, well, interesting (and that they should speak for a maximum of 20 minutes, TED-style). So there’s no theme as such, no ‘media sponsor’, no corporate tent, just 300 like-minded people in the Conway Hall at the end of June. As Russell himself says, ‘There'll be no goodie bags, no tiny food on lovely plates, no KPIs and no 'take-aways'. It's highly likely that there'll be awkward pauses when something goes wrong and if any of it is useful in any way to your career then we'll have failed.’ Sounds great doesn’t it?
Apparently one of last year’s stars was a guy who delivered a short speech about knots. And someone else demonstrated how to play a saw (we think). If you want to see what you missed, here’s a list of last year’s speakers, and for a full list of this year’s speakers keep an eye on Russell’s blog (he’s still working on the final line-up). 
As for content, well in a weak moment Michael suggested that there might be a way to explore the history of graphic design and guitar music by showing slides and playing guitar at the same time. This was indeed deemed interesting, but how to pull it off without seeming like a less funny Bill Bailey with a penchant for kerning will be quite a challenge.
As regards tickets for the event (on Saturday 21st June), it seemed to sell out in a matter of hours on Friday morning, so getting a ticket might be a case of keeping an eye on this page or finding someone who has one and extorting it out of them (in an interesting way, of course).
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25.04.08
A Rose for Winter
We’ve been customising a book for tonight’s Friday Late View at the V&A that celebrates the Artist Book. The event links to the Blood on Paper exhibition that runs until the 29th June. Our task was to work on an old Penguin of Laurie Lee’s A Rose for Winter, a kind of travel diary through civil-war-torn Andalusia that deals in death, humour and hopelessness. Our solution was to take violin strings (Lee was a violinist and often busked on his travels to raise funds) and bind 16 roses to the cover. 
The way it works tonight is that as long as a guest customises a book themselves, they will be able to enter an ‘artist’s book lotto’ and be able to take away one of the customised books, including the one shown here. So if you want to pick our roses, better get down there. 
We suspect as a cover it will ‘die’ in a very poignant way.
Here’s how our test cover from earlier in the week is looking four days later. 
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24.04.08
More than just Skin and Bones
If you’ve ever looked at a piece of modern fashion design and caught yourself seeing sculpture, or thought that a recent building looked a bit like a piece of clothing, then Skin and Bones (opening today at Somerset House) is your dream exhibition. Fashion and architectural examples are hung together, opposite, or side by side, so a Hussein Chalayan snuggles up to a Zaha Hadid, a Gehry sits near a Comme, and so on. Sounds a little tenuous in the abstract but in reality it’s stunning. Highly, highly recommended, and offers a great glimpse into what the new contemporary team at Somerset House have in store for us in their new space on the Embankment side of the site. At last the V&A has some competition, and London has another venue for modern art, architecture, fashion and design.
Images above from the exhibition catalogue designed by Multistorey. Skin and Bones opens today and runs until the 10th of August.
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23.04.08
The wrong kind of maths
It’s the time of the year when Britain’s most prestigious awards scheme, D&AD, announces its shortlist and as ever it makes for interesting reading.
D&AD attracts a lot of flak for its perceived bias towards advertising, and when you see pages of entries across TV and Cinema advertising and crafts that total a staggering 31 nominations, it’s understandable. The juries for Websites and Digital installations combine to slightly more sensible levels with 10 nominations, and Viral (a recent over-achiever) has come down to earth with 8 nominations. Environmental and Product design continue to punch above their weight with 14 and 9 nominations respectively, (perhaps reflecting where the interesting work now lies, or an ability for their category judges to encourage, not discourage).
But once again the story, or non-story really, is the paucity of decent results from the graphic design jury. 3 separate juries examined and debated across two days several thousand entries, which resulted in 30 or so in-book (ie chosen to be in the 2008 Annual) and a total of er, 2 nominations – a nice stamp and some paper carrier bags. In layman’s terms this translates as ‘There were only two good pieces of graphic design work done last year, and we’re not even sure if they will win a pencil! But carry on entering everyone!’
In previous years, this might have been offset by attractive figures in the categories related to graphics such as branding, packaging, editorial and books, and yes these categories have managed a respectable 15 nominations between them. Of course it may be true that 2007 was indeed a truly terrible year for graphic design’s traditional categories. But if you consider that last year’s graphics juries put about 80 things in the book and nominated 11 of them for an award, you’ve got to wonder about today’s list, wonder quite what changed quite so quick, and wonder what can be done.
Currently 20 judges, 2,000 pieces of work and two days equals two good pieces of graphic design. That’s an equation that won’t add up for a lot of people.
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22.04.08
Sorting out our RSS spaghetti
We’ve been experiencing a lot of issues with our ‘feed’, which if you only visit this page occasionally will mean nothing to you and feel free to switch off now or read something much more interesting.
Many of our subscribers have been suffering from multiple copies of past thoughts appearing in their RSS readers (conspiracy theorists amongst you may think this is all an elaborate way to get you to re-read old posts, it’s not, honest). After much digging, fixing and re-coding it appears the only sure-fire way to fix this will be to re-set your feed, sorry. This shouldn’t be difficult, just delete us from your reader then re-subscribe. If you’re subscribing via Google reader delete us, then go here to re-subscribe. If you’re RSS’ing through another reader delete then go here. For the Atom feed go here. First time around you may get all the recent posts as ‘new’ - mark them as read and then everything should be sorted. We hope. If you have any more issues, please contact us on info[at]johnsonbanks.co.uk.
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20.04.08
Pecha Kucha goes digital in London
Last Thursday night in London, D&AD hosted a digitally themed Pecha Kucha (the imported Japanese rapid fire presentation format). Luckily the speakers, whilst united by their slightly geeky day-jobs, opted not to walk us through the history of the pixel or precisely how to tween. Between them, they offered a intriguing glimpse into what drove them; their hopes and inspirations, the running theme being loosely ‘things they loved’ rather than ‘things they did’.
Inevitably, some of their slots stood out more than others – the cruel monotony of Pecha Kucha’s immovable 20 second pulse unnerves even the most practised of public speakers, but still, it worked. Nat Hunter (from Airside) bravely tried to engage the hall in green issues as she argued that even pixel-punks have to care just as much about their carbon footprint. It’s been argued recently that keeping one avatar alive in Second Life uses the equivalent energy needs of your average real, non-digital Brazilian.
Several opened their speeches by admitting they were racked by nerves, which turned out to be a sound tactic. From bumbling starts David Streek’s endearingly personal journey through the history of gaming or Tom Evans’ adhoc style helped you forgive their lack of rostrum repertoire and just enjoy the moment.
This is of course when Pecha Kucha delivers in spades – Streek’s observations such as ‘turn a trackball upside down and you’ve got a mouse’ were truly insightful, but I’m not convinced the hall would have stuck 60 minutes of gaming confessionals, whereas 6 minutes was perfect.
Several discussed the design of urinals. Many revealed, simply by their age, that they had indeed studied other subjects before falling into digital. Some told us how wacky and crazy they were (but the ones that did weren’t perhaps that persuasive).
The clear stand-outs of the evening came near the beginning and the end. As Sanky from AllofUs drew the event to a close it would have been easy to forget Dalgit Singh’s early and hilarious ramble through the state of his conscious and unconscious mind, showing us the sculptural arrangements he makes whilst sleepwalking and then photographs on waking up. True.
And he almost stole the show only minutes after it had begun with his stills and movies of a recent trip to North Korea to see ‘the world’s largest digital screen’... 
...which, after a nicely timed pause he revealed to be fuelled by thousands of entirely analogue schoolchildren. Fantastic. 
For us the unexpected star was Tom Bazely from Lean Mean Fighting Machine, whose talk began with a black and white photographic slide covered in coloured scrawl which he proceed to read out. Your first reaction was ‘oh please’. But it took exactly 20 seconds to read. The second, 19. The third, about 21.
Your early thought was ‘he’s never going to keep this up’, but the did. He’d managed to construct his talk to time almost perfectly to the twenty second rhythm, and as he talked through the slides, each often funny and insightful, it dawned that he was simply reading a list of ‘things people like’. Like waking up in the morning with a numb arm. Or hitting any kind of half volley. Here are a few slides to see for yourself.
Marvellous.
There’s talk of Pecha Kucha finding a permanent home for itself in London. Let’s hope so – it can’t come soon enough.
D&AD’s Digital Pecha Kucha speakers included Daljit Singh from Digit, Tom Bazeley from Lean Mean Fighting Machine, Florian Schmitt from Hi-ReS!, David Streek from playerthree, Nic Roope from Poke, Fred Flade from de-construct, Sanky from AllofUs, Tom Evans from Mook, Laura J Bambach by Glue, Liz Sivell from Profero, Kevin Russell from AKQA , Nat Hunter from Airside and was kicked off by Mark Dytham, Klein Dytham.
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16.04.08
Catch another wave
Following on from our Hokusai extravaganza a week or two ago, Dana Chen sent us some more, spotted on the side of a Wells Fargo in Santa Monica. Surf’s up. 
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13.04.08
Strangely attracted to polarity
After an exhausting few days spent helping to judge one of the world’s major award schemes, I’m left with a sinking feeling.
Not so much about the results from my particular jury, which were encouraging and deserve more analysis once nominations are announced, but from watching polarity at work.
By this I mean observing first hand peoples’ reactions to work that falls outside their comfort zone and discombobulates them a little. As a judge this places them in a difficult position – ‘am I looking at something bold and brilliant, or different and dreadful?’ they ask themselves. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot easier to vote ‘dreadful’ at that point. There’s much less chance of being left exposed and having to argue a case based merely on a hunch rather than solid facts and provenance.
The polarising effect that creative ideas have on people isn’t new. Advertising agencies live in fear of research groups because genuinely innovative ideas fall outside most focus group attendees’ frames of reference. This leaves them with nothing positive to say, researchers begin their forensic analysis and before you know it the gold-winner lies in tatters on the floor (usually with a much bigger logo and a price flash to boot).
Innovative designers, whether you like their work or not, are the ones most criticised both in real life and the blogosphere (just read the comments here on Sagmeister and here on Barnbrook). What was their crime? Well, to dare to be different and be prepared to take a risk.
In the context of judging a competition, this manifests itself in shortlisted pieces that are strangely neutral, the design equivalent of ‘compromise candidates’. This often comes as a surprise to the judges who view their collection of ‘good but not astounding’ work and often look at each other at this point as if to say ‘did we really vote this in?’.
Actually, it’s no surprise at all – the polarity effect has usually left a handful of outstanding ideas either in the bin or on the verge of it because they attracted as many ‘no’ votes as ‘yes’ votes. It takes strong judges at that point to speak up, stick their neck out and argue for the new.
There’s a famous story about the Guinness surfer advert (you know ‘tick, tock’, Ahab, surfers, horses, beer) being rejected at the early stages of D&AD judging, and thus out of the competition altogether. At the time it was so controversial, and so new, many in the industry feared it. Of course, surreal, disembodied ads that don’t explain themselves until the end-line (if ever) are commonplace now. The nervous group of judges that voted it out had in fact seen advertising’s future, (and some of them probably knew it). But it tore them apart in the process.
So how do you reverse the polarity effect? Well, it’s difficult. Once positions have been taken and minds made up, advocates for ‘different’ have a difficult time persuading others. Opposites oppose, not attract. In the nineties the ads for the launch of Orange made it into D&AD, but not the logo. The identity jury that year obviously didn’t think it was interesting enough – ‘what an odd name, what dull type, why the orange square?’ Do you think those judges ever play back those results to themselves and wonder if they missed something?
But there is hope. The surfer ad that lay rejected at the end of the first day was pulled back into contention, after some debate.
It won Gold. Twice.
Michael Johnson was foreman last week of D&AD’s Branding and Identity category. Nominations for the all the awards will be made public later this month and the awards ceremony is on 15th May.
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11.04.08
The auction is over
You may have already read that the University of Lincoln had a good idea to raise funds for their degree show this year, to collect examples of work from designers and auction them off to the highest bidder. We found out last night that they managed to raise nearly £7,000 for the 127 lots they had on offer. And we’re very pleased that we managed to fight off several interested lecturers and purchase this famous John McConnell poster for the regeneration of Napoli. We paid slightly more we’d expected for it (scarily close to our ‘reserve’ of £250) but what the heck, it’s all for a good cause. And a great poster. And what a good idea.
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08.04.08
Chit-chat, Tokyo style
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve eagerly awaited a lecture or conference only to be disappointed by the speakers. For people used to expressing themselves visually, designers seem to have a kind of inbuilt stumbling block when it comes to verbalising about their work. In fact hang around at the end of most design lectures and you’ll repeatedly hear a damning phrase - ‘yeah, but the work was great wasn’t it?’ We’ve all got used to the fact that designers can’t talk and now manage our expectations accordingly. Not everyone can be Spiekermann or Sagmeister (both truly excellent speakers) but even the greatest designers in the world can turn the most committed acolyte comatose if monotonous delivery, comfy seats and over-zealous central heating combine to the wrong effect. I’m sure this is one of the reasons why the Pecha Kucha (??????) phenomenon, now 5 years old, has been so successful. By limiting the speakers to short presentations, if someone’s useless, the work is dreadful, you don’t agree with what they’re saying or you hate their tie, you only have to endure five more minutes and they’re off. Not fifty-five minutes and the continual fear of snoring loudly as they load their third carousel of slides. The mathematics of Pecha Kucha (originating from the Japanese for the sound of conversation - ‘chit-chat’) are dead easy – 20 slides per speaker, 20 seconds per slide, ideally starting at precisely 20.20 in the evening. Oddly, the recommended amount of speakers is 14 (what happened to the 20:20:20 rule there?), but essentially a gloriously simple idea. In fact it’s so simple that Pecha Kucha’s originators, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein of Klein Dytham architects, have given birth to a monster that has rampaged across the globe – at the last count PK nights are planned or have taken place in 118 countries around the world. This has forced Dytham to face up to registering the name and the idea whilst fighting off several parties (especially in the UK) who can see big bucks in the idea and have tried to steal it, or register it, often without even asking. Preparing to do a PK is a surreal experience. Choosing 20 slides is no problem but the monotonous regularity of the 20 second interval is the killer. In my particular case, I’m not one of those speakers who will talk at a regular pace over images - I might talk for 30 seconds over one, 130 over another, 3 over another. So forcing yourself into a timed straightjacket is tough. Then you have to consider your audience – when I’ve done a PK in the UK it’s been to an arty, ‘in the know’ audience sitting down at the ICA, but a week or so ago it fell to me to ‘perform’ at the 50th ever Tokyo Pecha Kucha (or peh-chak-cha, to give it its Tokyo nickname) at it’s birthplace, a converted concrete taxi garage under Roppongi called SuperDeluxe. It’s a long rectangular space with a seating side and a drinking side. The speakers, whilst they benefit from 3 simultaneous digital projectors beaming all along one wall, immediately have to battle with the inexorable draw of the analogue chit-chat at the bar. Especially if you’re dull or a bit off your game. We missed a few of the early speakers but arrived soon enough to catch some truly remarkable designs and animations by Hiro Sugiyama. The work of the Chinese/Japanese architectural group Mad Architects stood out as truly astonishing, although it’s not clear how much of is actually built yet (but that doesn’t seem to matter too much any more). Film lecturer Noam Toran from the Royal College of Art delivered what I thought was a really neat selection of clips and stills from horror films and suchlike but neglected to tell anyone at the start WHY he was doing this (and that he was in fact a film lecturer) so left the audience a little bemused. It reminded me a little of that great presentation advice to always tell your audience at the beginning what they are about to be told, tell them again as you go through and tell them again at the end. At the end of the first half, Japanese light-painters Tochka charmed the audience with examples of their time-lapse work and then proceeded to indulge in a bit of half-time-beer-break ‘instant workshopping’ with the crowd as they all waved their mobile phones, lighters, pigtails, whatever in the air. I’m not doing it justice – follow the link, it’s great. Current D&AD President Simon Waterfall dealt admirably with the last slot of the night as he delivered his sake-fuelled digital manifesto but for truly attention grabbing chutzpah the fantastically named Teddy Cookswell delivered a perfectly themed talk about Tom Cruise, gorillas, colour, sperm and sex (or something like that) in both Japanese and English to a truly Jinglish crowd that combined all the elements of performance, stand-up, theatre and entertainment to a perfect level. Brush up on your Japanese with a YouTube version here. Blimey. Follow that. By the time I came on, at past 10.30 with the audience clearly split between the sitters and the drinkers, my carefully crafted set of slides were just a bit too, well, nice. That which worked well in daylight and even included the odd (and diligently learned) bit of Japanese vocab seemed a bit out of place at night in a drunken Aoyama basement. Thank goodness I only had to endure six and a half minutes. I learned later that Dytham, as he out-troduced me, said I was good at oyajigyagu which translates roughly as someone who tells ‘dad jokes’. Mmm, thanks Mark. There’s a famous adage about there being a great talk inside every creative person, called ‘my work’. But as I read the nice little book about Pecha Kucha that has been produced to commemorate the 50th, it suggests that a good PK talk often veers miles away from ‘my work’, and is far better because of it. It’s good advice. Save your life story for the alumni presentation at your old college – Pecha Kucha is 6 minutes and 40 seconds of pure entertainment, ideally on one topic, the weirder the better. Sounds simple really, doesn’t it? Sadly, it isn’t. 
Above, Mark Dytham, Michael Johnson and Astrid Klein
Michael Johnson was speaking at the 50th Tokyo Pecha Kucha along with Jon Yong Fook Cockle (true), Shinobu Machida, Onkar Kular, NAYA architects, Uleshka Asher, Hiro Sugiyama, Kazue Monno + Takeshi Nagata from Tochka, Teddy Cookswell, UltraSuperNew, Noam Toran, Silas Hickey, Yosuke Hayano from MAD, Simon Waterfall and Klein Dytham architecture. The next London Pecha Kucha is digitally themed, hosted by D&AD and takes place at the Logan Hall on the 17th of April. Better book quick.
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03.04.08
Apologies, apologies, apologies
Apologies to our many readers who access this site via RSS readers, it seems that some of you are receiving multiple versions of old posts. This isn’t a sneaky way to get you to look at the back catalogue, honest, just a CMS glitch we're trying to iron out since a server move. Sorry. Thanks to Ross and Neil for the tip.
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02.04.08
A day best spent suspending disbelief
April Fool’s day is a gift for the blogosphere - at one time it was just fun to listen to Radio Four and try and guess which piece was a scam, but now most of yesterday was spent reading web articles and thinking, ‘mmm, I wonder.’ So yesterday we had flying Penguins from the BBC (which disappointingly they had owned up to before the day was out and had turned into an I-Player ad) and Erik Spiekermann being knighted and working for Microsoft for a vast salary (does two scams in one make it true?). We had Carla Bruni working for the Government in The Guardian (very funny, but given away in the first line but the writer’s name, Avril de Poisson). Overnight we had a classic Ford ‘re-design’ on Brand New (as well as some great ‘outrage’ in the discussion string about the Mouse logo). We had The Serif’s starter for the day, Helvetica Serif, and the more typographically minded could admire Typophile’s new ‘black’ site, along with hilarious ‘positive’ comments, interspersed with confused visitors wanting to know why this appalling mess of reversed out retro-ness was actually good, at all. That’s where cyberspace gets a bit savage, of course - we had countless calls and emails about Mousey yesterday (which was obviously a ‘fool’ to us but seemed to trick a few). But that didn’t stop at least one blog wagging the finger at us, obviously not getting the joke at all. And there’s a lovely, plaintive comment on the discussion string for Helvetica serif where a visitor asks ‘For those of us who are typographically challenged, could someone please explain what’s funny about a Helvetica Serif? I’m not saying that it’s not funny, I just don’t get it… at all.’ Unfortunately by the end of the day, everything seems like a trick. So this piece on the CR Blog about artist Dan Proops just HAD to be a spoof, didn’t it? Well, unless Mr Proops has managed to re-programme Google, no, he’s for real and actually the grandson of the agony aunt Marjorie Proops. No, really, it’s true. Honest.
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01.04.08
The threat of litigation at johnson banks
 It is with some regret that we have to announce that our recently designed ‘Mouse’ logo is too close to a design already registered by one of the major shampoo manufacturers. For legal reasons they can’t be named, but they have asked us to print their version of the mark and to issue a public apology, so on behalf of everyone at johnson banks we’re deeply sorry for any perceived similarity. Their already registered version is shown above. The Microsoft Mouse Advertising Awards will be reverting to a simple wordmark whilst we re-design the logo, which is unfortunate since it has been written up extensively on design blogs worldwide and in this month’s Creative Review. Again, apologies to all concerned. (Big hint: this was posted on the first of April)
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