27.11.09 The perfect typeface for movies (or wars)
It’s long been noted that the typeface Trajan (based on the inscriptions on Trajan’s column) has become Hollywood and American TV’s favourite typeface. It’s solid. It has gravitas. It’s been around for thousands of years.
Now why or how a government inquiry ends up with its own logo is for separate debate, but perhaps they already know that someone will make a movie about it. Or the inquiry itself will last for thousands of years.
My brief trip to China last week was my first, ever. In the few hours off that I had, I frittered away a forgettable hour looking for Chinese guitars, but then my visit to Beijing’s Dirt Market (panjiayuan) was quite the reverse.
There are hundreds of things you can observe from this market. How appallingly cold it was, or that there are a staggering amount of stalls specialising in jade bracelets. But as I walked around with a camera, collecting images, the 33-years-dead Chinese leader, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung was following me.
Now at school I studied Mao - The Revolutionary. I mugged up on the long march and the good and bad sides to life in post-war China.
But I wasn't prepared for Mao - The Brand. Everywhere you look, he stares at you. Busts, hats, rucksacks, posters, badges, clocks, watches. It’s amazing.
Presumably there’s a substantial collectors market for this product and I eventually cracked myself, returning home with a Mao rucksack emblazoned with a classic quote, ‘Serve the People’. (I looked for one that said ‘The peoples of the world who struggle to oppose American imperialism and its running dogs will achieve the greatest victory’ - but weirdly couldn't find one).
On returning, just a quick bit of ebay searching shows that there are collectors out there happy to shell out thousands of dollars for porcelain Maos to dominate their mantlepieces.
Is this the same Mao that let millions starve during the Great Leap Forward? Perhaps. Buried hundreds of scholars alive? Quite possibly. The same Mao that watched millions more disappear during the Cultural Revolution? That’s the one.
Would we visit Rome and scour flea markets for busts of Mussolini, or rummage for SS stuff in Berlin? Do millions of tourists visit London’s Camden market each year and leave disappointed that they couldn’t buy any Margaret Thatcher memorabilia? I doubt it.
It’s hard to judge exactly how ‘New China’ truly feels about the elevation of Mao to this odd form of marketing (and therefore capitalist) sainthood. Mao’s own grand-daughter has defended ‘Brand Mao’ and the phenomenon of his face on everything: ‘It shows his influence, that he exists in people's consciousness and has influenced several generations of Chinese people's way of life. Just like Che Guevara's image, his has become a symbol of revolutionary culture. It is natural that he would be used on T-shirts or cups as a cultural logo.’
And of course, designers stroll through this market stuffed with this remarkable iconography and it’s hard not be be seduced. Who wouldn’t be by all that white red and black?
When someone told me that there’s a Mao tie-up with Coke (or was it Pepsi?) I wasn’t really surprised. But I did double-take a little.
Our 20th century revolutionary icons (Che, Lenin, Stalin and Mao) have become the faces that sell cola and t-shirts. Class struggle has become size struggle.
20.11.09 Guitars and Graphics, the two minute version
D&AD have kindly sent us a very nicely edited film of Michael Johnson’s Guitars and Graphics talk at this year’s Xchange conference. Here’s a brief excerpt.
There’s talk of G&G doing some northern dates early next year. We’ll keep you posted.
Thanks to Dion at D&AD for his skilful filming and editing.
A brief was set to Chinese Universities by an alliance of five UK organisations (Kingston University, The Science Museum, Design Museum, Wellcome Trust, Bournemouth University) and the British Council. A cluster of judges were picked to help cull initial entries from throughout China down to the five ideas that were presented at a live final over the weekend.
The task was to create interdisciplinary teams to examine the science of sleeping and dreaming, find ways to illustrate theories and discoveries in unusual, informative (and non-sciency) ways, and present them back with slides and films. Each team had just 15 minutes to make their case.
The overall standard was pretty high - here are some highlights.
The team from Hunan University designed an immersive interactive exhibit which would explain the differences between rapid eye moment (REM) sleep, and sleep without REM, and how you would feel when awoken from different sleeping states.
A team from Southeast University picked the ‘Activation-Synthesis’ theory of dreaming (as you do), which starts to explain how your brain compiles dreams from scattered memories over a few days, how it merrily makes your dreams completely illogical and produces dreams with no actual language in them.
The team from Xiamen University proposed a vast brain-shaped exhibition stuffed with interactives that would answer these key questions.
Part of their proposal also involved a random dream generator, which would spit out varying scary stories depending on what buttons you pressed to create your dream cocktail.
China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (who presented their team photo like this, as you do)...
...looked at the interrelationship of food and dreams, and designed a three level building dedicated to exhibitions and kitchens and curated displays. This was all topped off with a hotel on the top floor where (presumably) you could test whether pigging out on chocolate and cheese just before bedtime would send you into dream-hell or not.
The eventual winner, Team 321 from Beijing Institute of Fashion and Technology, decided that they would wage a public campaign to educate people into realising that your body can fight cancers and depression in your sleep by releasing hormones and endorphins.
They took the unusual decision to dress themselves as various chemicals, both good and bad, and proposed a catwalk show as the central component of their idea. Here are some of the costumes, events and animation stills.
All a bit bonkers, but fun and involving, and the kind of idea you could see on at our own Science Museum here in London. So, a deserved winner.
All the entrants get a chance at winning scholarships to UK Universities, and as top prize Team 321 won a week over here in the spring, all expenses paid. Watch out London.
By Michael Johnson
Thanks to the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Beijing for their hospitality over the judging period. When the video presentations are up on the British Council/Dreamlab website we'll put another link up here.
Recently I was asked by a design journal to name ‘my design hero’.
For decades, I hoovered up the design and writing of what would have been my nominations, whether it was Paul Rand, Bruno Munari, or Tibor Kalman. So one hero shouldn’t have been difficult. But after a while, if you’ve read all their books and absorbed all their work, what do you do next?
More recently I seem to have stopped looking at other people’s work for inspiration - I’m more likely to be inspired by an approach, or a thought, or just a project.
A great example of a hero ‘project’ is when they curated, designed and sent records into deep space attached to the Voyager space probes, 32 years ago, which as I write (and you read) are hurtling through deep space on some unknown journey.
The records that Carl Sagan and his team compiled contained recordings of earth’s noises, voices, an image library of pictures and dozens of tracks of music that were felt to represent the finest achievements of man. A bizarre time capsule of the state of the earth in the late seventies, all carefully recorded onto a disc meant to be played at 16 rpm (this is pre digital, remember) by a stylus hidden within the spacecraft.
How they agreed on which pictures, and which recordings, are a separate tale - The Beatles said ‘yes’ to ‘Here comes the Sun’ (nice music/space pun) being included but their record company (EMI) said ‘no’ – obviously worried about deep space copyright infringement.
Why this project fascinates me is hard to pin down. The chances of any extraterrestrials scooping them up is pretty low, as is the likelihood of their being in any fit state to be played after millions of years drifting through meteor-strewn nothingness.
I think it’s the grand ambition of the project that I love - the mad schoolboy sci-fi ‘what-if?’ A bunch of astro-science-hippes persuaded NASA to do it, then they just had weeks to pull it together. In terms of a project that elevates me above the everyday and the hum-drum and inspires ‘what-ifs’ of my own, it’s right up there. This is an adaptation of a recent piece for Design Week magazine by Michael Johnson. The wiki page on the Voyager record project is a good place to start for more info. If you’re interested it’s well worth tracking down ‘Murmurs of Earth’, the book that was written about the project.
It’s the 9th of November, and those of you with longish memories will remember that 8 days ago we should have witnessed the grand unveiling of the new logo for London. But we didn’t.
So it was down to two, one of which was Conran (yes, they of restaurants and shops) and the other still remains undisclosed (although rumours suggest that it could be Dragon brands/Dragon Rouge, they of Consignia fame, but that’s unconfirmed). All slightly odd. Conran have even revealed that their idea is based on the principle of an open quote mark. Er, OK, great.
The design tender took place at the same time as one for PR and for the running of a ‘public engagement programme’ (we think that’s code for market research), and the working budget was about half a million (pounds). Several of our sources and one Deep Throat who refuses to be named report that the final presentation of the three pronged strategy and design options went badly.
So badly that the steering group (on sight of their options) collectively asked ‘why are we doing this?’ to the marketing project leader, at which point the flaxen-haired one also asked ‘why are we doing this?’ Not good.
Incidentally, in case you’re wondering if we got feedback from the GLA about our tender, we were told we were too expensive (always a good place to be, happy with that).
We’ve since heard off-the-record feedback that any group involved with any of the previous work for any constituent part was immediately discounted (which swiftly took johnson banks, Saffron, Wolff Olins and Interbrand out of the equation, that’s if they even got involved).
04.11.09 From the archive: the ‘still a good idea’ sale
For some reason, in early 2004 we skipped the whole Christmas card thing and sent everyone a ‘still a good idea’ sale catalogue. A really weird idea, with re-photographed, unused ideas.
We found a copy in a plan chest yesterday. Some of the thoughts are still quite strange. Such as this imagery about polluted cities (starting with London).
Or this idea about making more of local heritage.
Or this thought that the ‘serving suggestion’ often featured on packs could indeed be the brand itself.
Or (in a similar vein) perhaps you could brand everything the size it actually was.
Or this still quite neat idea of an inside-out book. Ideal for Rachel Whiteread, we always thought.
It’s fair to say that most of these ideas are still unused. Funny that.
