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27.02.09
End of February Timepieces
Here are some more of the time pieces readers have sent in this month. Matt Hallock sent us the image above saying ‘it's how much gas $20 purchases for a 10 gallon car’. Ben Archer in New Zealand sent us this flywheel: ‘I’ve had the attached image for longer than I recall. A photographer friend gave me a watch with a revealed movement. I put it on my trusty flatbed scanner. The movement of the flywheel on the left generated the interference patterns as the scanner head passed underneath it’. 
And Nigel Brachi in Alberta has been musing on the idea of time and infinity. 
This project stems from a section on our main site dedicated to people’s responses to an open brief of Time. Feel free to send us your ideas (info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk), the best ones are posted here on Thought for the week.
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25.02.09
Three’s a crowd
Decision-making by crowds? It’s everywhere.
It happens in its most simplistic fashion when many millions place their votes during Pop (or American) Idol, often merrily subverting the whole process by voting for the last person the record company execs really want to win. When we visit our favourite sites, we’re unconsciously crowd-voting, and Google’s famous page-linking software does the rest (by counting those clicks and ranking them accordingly).
For at least a decade, software companies and gaming developers have been out-sourcing tricky programming problems. They don’t use a hand-picked team of experts: they let hundreds, sometimes thousands of geeks compete with one another, to crack just a few lines of code or modify their favourite game (and maybe make some pocket money in the process).
The design and communication industry has been reacting in different ways to this idea, now known as ‘crowdsourcing’ (courtesy of the Wired journalist Jeff Howe who wrote an interesting book on the phenomenon last year). Some of his examples of success are beguiling – clothing manufacturer Threadless has for most of the noughties been publishing and printing designs submitted by its community. But only the most voted for designs are produced, and every edition sells out. Its ‘crowd’ designs, and chooses its own clothing – the perfectly designed, self-editing, self-selecting marketplace. The now ubiquitous iStock started as a site for amateur photographers to publish and share images, and for some time was charging as little as a dollar an image (before Getty images swept in and started pushing the prices up).
But other examples of crowd-sourcing are more troublesome. The blogosphere lit up in indignation at this recent piece in Forbes magazine, highlighting the Crowdspring design site. 
In case you haven’t been, or heard, ‘clients’ post a design brief and offer $500 or so for the ‘best’ design (which they have to select if they receive more than 25 entries). Trouble is, the would-be recipients merrily post their critiques and prescriptions as the projects pan out, and often seem to be the clients from hell, with the budgets from nowhere. Howe himself ran a crowd-sourcing competition for the design of his own bookjacket last year (but whether he got the best solution, or whether the vote was fair, is highly debatable). 
And whereas Threadless eventually offered their most successful t-shirt design a job at the firm, I’m not sure if that will happen soon to the recent ‘winners’ on Crowdspring (see below). You can draw your own conclusions. 
The advertising industry loves crowd-sourcing too, but has its own name – User Generated Content. After a brief period when some genuinely great ideas were produced (like Nike’s ‘chain’) we’re now in a rather tedious stage where every client is after it’s own magic bit of UGC angel dust and asks for people to make ads for them (‘we’ll choose the best!’ ‘you can be famous!’). Or they’re asked to provide images, or video, or bloggage, all desperate to catch the social media bandwagon as it thunders through brand-town.
Even the government is getting in on this, the most prevalent being the ‘mass free pitch’ which is now applied to everything from Olympic bid logos to coins. The drawback of this is the filtering process that’s applied to the entries. Whilst in my heart I can see that letting everyone design a coin or stamp or a logo is pretty democratic, the committees doing the actual choosing often leave a lot to be desired: the ‘filter’ is often the fatal flaw, not the ideas themselves.
I arrived at the ‘Olympic bid logo’ judging day 5 years ago to learn that the 1,000 designs that had been submitted (true) had been whittled down by someone, somewhere, with no reference to any trained designers, to seven routes. Yes, 1,000 to seven. Just like that. (I’d advised they try and get it down to 50 but the other 43 were nowhere to be seen). Nowhere in that room were any of my favourites (like Daniel Eatock’s) – they hadn’t even made the cut. 
Little wonder that a motley jury made up of a celebrity, a designer, a taxi driver, an athlete (and a bunch of suits) couldn’t agree and we ended up with a compromise ribbon-bid logo much like every other ribbon-bid logo. 
The Royal Mint manages to filter their pitches a little better and Matthew Dent’s lovely coin set was the result (although the runner-up was the esteemed stamp designer David Gentleman. I wonder if we’ll ever see his designs?).
Encouraged by this, we’re now encouraged to enter designs for 27 coins for the Olympics (presumably a number correlating roughly to the amount of Olympic events). I still can’t help wondering if the modus operandi adopted by the Royal Mail for its stamps is a better one: select a handful of good designers and pay them a little ‘seed’ money for some initial ideas, with budget in the bank to develop the favourites… But what do I know. Maybe the ‘Dent’ scenario will hold and somewhere a British teenager is engraving the perfect discus drawing for our future 50p pieces. Maybe.
Meanwhile, crowd-sourcing, in various guises, seems to be here to stay. Even in our studio we’ve relaxed the ‘this is my project, this is your project’ rules so that our first design stages are effectively a free-for-all burst of design activity. After a week, our metal walls are covered in dozens of ideas from all angles, sometimes building on others, sometimes stand-alone. The best ones get developed and shown, even if the idea is the intern’s it has as much chance as anyone else’s. The only challenge is putting egos aside, objectively filtering, and picking the best routes.
It cuts against the ‘we’re professionals, we know what’s best, we’ll show you one route’ school of thought, but whose to say that was ever the best way of working in the first place. Perhaps the ‘trust the guru to crack it’ approach is itself finally cracking?
You wonder if the design competitions could dabble in a little crowd-sourcing themselves. The Oscar results are based on an academy crowd-vote of 3,000 plus members – perhaps D&AD should put each jury’s ‘best ten’ to a public vote? We toyed with a ‘people’s pencil’ a few years ago at D&AD, but do it properly, on-line (and make sure people couldn’t cheat) and you might have something genuinely useful, and valued. The long-defunct BBC design awards were based on precisely that – a shortlist of half a dozen entries, explained by a few short films, then over to the public to vote. ‘Crowd-voted’ by hundreds of thousands, enjoyed, appreciated and pretty damn democratic as well. Perhaps they were just ahead of their time?
Jeff Howe’s book: ‘Crowdsourcing, How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business’ is available from Random House
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18.02.09
Freehand Anonymous
I discovered recently that this (allegedly) high-tech industry of ours is populated by a whole tranche of designers quietly hanging on to an old, obsolete piece of drawing software. They know they shouldn’t, they get ridiculed for it, but they can’t help it. A piece of software that has been ever-present for decades, and a tough habit to crack. Like the beginning of an AA meeting where people stand and admit that they’re hardened drinkers, it’s time to stand up and say that ‘my name is Michael and yes, I do still use Freehand’. At this point readers will be experiencing mixed emotions – some will be thinking “what an old saddo”. Younger ones will be asking “what’s Freehand?”. But, especially in the UK, it seems that a lot of people will be quietly nodding their heads. Little things started to give it away. I asked Michael C Place for some text from a D&AD project recently and his answer was in the affirmative “as long as I didn’t mind getting it in Freehand”. 
We discovered recently that Dixon Baxi were still advocates. Some quiet digging revealed a vast array of design studios still using it: Neville Brody, Why Not Associates, Spin, to name a few. The Designers Republic were committed fans, and we suspect there are still users in North’s and Jonathan Barnbrook’s studios too. (Here’s one of TDR’s last projects, a poster entitled ‘Save Freehand’)
Mr Place declined to contribute to this piece, not wanting to get involved in discussion about a piece of software, and has a point. But it seems the choice to use, and continue to use this program is more than just geekery. If Quark users have to migrate to InDesign, at least they’re moving to something on a par, and in some cases better. Just ten minutes with Keynote persuades most people to happily drop Powerpoint like a stone, such is the gulf in quality. But Freehand users are coping with a transition to something they see as a step sideways, often backwards. It was one of the great, original debates of the graphic design business – “which program do you use to draw?” Battle lines were drawn early between the intuitive, easy-to-learn Aldus Freehand and Adobe’s more technical Illustrator. Malcolm Garrett remembers it well. “There was a sense that if you required a particular kind of precision then Illustrator was the way to go, in the same way the XPress won out over PageMaker. The clue is in the ordinariness of the names, Freehand, and PageMaker, they just don’t say ‘professional’. I remember Erik Spiekermann once saying he disliked Freehand, because it was too, er, ‘freehand’”. He thinks that “designers who felt they were more ‘expressive’ liked the basic feel of Freehand, which allowed them to create in a welcoming environment, more akin to art studio than drawing office. For some reason Illustrator gave the impression that it was more technical and thus less expressive”. Garrett feels the differences are minimal but hardened users jump straight to its defence. “It’s intuitive and fast” says Aporva Baxi from Dixon Baxi, still determinedly delivering artwork to printers in Freehand, despite the protests. “We just feel at home and can work very fast using it allowing us to concentrate on the creative. The fact that you can drag any number of pages around, create a full book, guidelines or presentation whilst still being able to design freely is liberating”. 
For Spin’s Tony Brook it was love at first sight. “I went from a complete computer virgin, to a happy clapping convert in a matter of hours. I have met so many passionate advocates of Freehand, it is like a badge of honour, whereas your common or garden Illustrator disciple just mumbles and calls me old, (which may be true, but it if that’s the best they can do…)”. 
Why Not Associate’s Andy Altmann reveals that it “was great for designing all the typographic layouts for the environmental projects we have collaborated on with artist Gordon Young. The typographic trees in Crawley, the entire 320m of the typographic pavement in Morecambe (image shown at the top of this post) – it would have been really painful to have done it in anything else”. Amazingly Altmann also admits that the entire artwork for the seminal Typography Now was done as 200 individual pages in the program. Nearly all of it’s adherents know the writing has been on the wall ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, getting their hands on the crown jewel, Flash. The 2007 announcement that Freehand wouldn’t be updated came as no surprise, and Adobe’s position on this is clear: “Adobe has no plans to initiate development to add new features. While we recognize it has a loyal customer base, we encourage users to migrate to the new Adobe Illustrator….” To Adobe, bouncing a bunch of ‘has-beens’ into switching makes logical sense, and without any apparent fan-base in the States (a US source could only think of one designer they knew still using it) they faced no significant backlash there. But its impending demise will feel like amputation to some. “For me it basically feels like an additional limb used purely for design, a third arm that understand and knows what I want” says Nick Hard in Neville Brody’s Research Studios. Brody himself happily admits that he’s been using the program for 21 years (and has assistants younger than his favourite piece of software).
Baxi admits they “quietly dread the day we have to install a system update to OSX that suddenly conflicts with it”. Tony Brook reveals that “Adobe have finally beaten me into submission. This Christmas I did a day’s course on Illustrator. I still don’t get it”. For this writer, once a Freehand beta-tester, it’s been ever-present on a twenty-year journey. But now my copy won’t let me print out anything containing fonts (bit of a drawback), and regularly needs re-booting/re-installing. (Not ideal). Garrett criticizes this as an inherent inability to embrace change, a sort of ‘I know what I like, and I like what I know’ culture. Er, thanks for that. Perhaps because of this, johnson banks has moved into an odd, hybrid world where logos are often designed in the old favourite for speed, then artworked in Illustrator. 
Garrett is right of course, and the news that The Designers Republic has folded should perhaps be the death-knell for their favourite piece of software too. Its central place in British Graphic design for twenty years is coming to an end. At least there’s a glimmer of hope. It seems that Adobe has (finally) acknowledged that Illustrator could do with some of Freehand’s best bits (like multiple, different sized pages in a document, and even simple old ‘paste-inside’). Perhaps they’ll send me a copy of CS4 and I’ll be a (slightly late) beta tester? But in the meantime, I have a logo to do by this afternoon, I think I’ll just knock out a few quick ideas in a program I know well… This is an adaptation of a recent piece for Creative Review magazine. Thanks to Why Not Associates, Build, Dixon Baxi, Research Studios and Spin for the images shown above.
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16.02.09
Neville Brody, fifteen years later
Continuing the theme of ‘ancient interviews found in a recent clear up’ here’s the transcription of a discussion between Neville Brody and Michael Johnson, in 1994, on the eve of the publication of Brody’s second book. The frozen wastes of a Lancashire college were never ideal for learning about Graphic Design. When I was there in the early ’80’s my local newsagent never had a single design magazine on its shelf. But it didn’t matter one little bit, because my graphics magazine came out every month, and it was called The Face.
Now here we are in 1994 and Neville Brody’s second book is amongst us, six years after the first. And me, the silent student of a decade before? Well, I’ve been despatched to quiz the man; the man who became one of the first household names of Graphic design; the man whose first decade of work was almost universal; the man whose second decade of work is almost unknown. MJ: So, why a second book?
NB: Well, for a number of reasons - I had a body of work that hadn’t been seen by most people and I wanted it to be seen. After the exhibition and first book, UK work pretty much dried up until about a year ago.
MJ: Was that to do with over exposure?
NB: No - generally clients thought we would be either too expensive or too busy. Also I tend to be fairly opinionated. In England designers are supposed to be seen and not heard.
MJ: You’ve gone much more underground in the last six years.
NB: Partly because we haven’t had the opportunity to be overground. At first we were denied, and then we began to see it as a good thing. Six months after the first book I was fairly depressed, walking down the street for a meeting with the bank manager, nearly bankrupt, seeing posters ripping off my work, it all seemed totally unfair. In a way we were forced underground, but it was better in a way because we could get on with the job of pushing ideas in design.
MJ: That stating of a graphic ‘creed’, that you were partly responsible for, the baton passes every two or three years. Are there any of the newer designers that you empathise with?
NB: I’ve seen a lot of work that I think is really good - from Why Not, from Tomato, Malcolm Garret, Phil Bicker, Trevor Jackson, Designers Republic. It’s been an exciting time, but there’s just this funny thing about the British - they seem to hate giving praise or support . Undoubtedly, if The Designers Republic became really successful here, they’d end up going abroad for work.
MJ: What do you think of the English client mentality?
NB: They always knows what they want, and what they don’t want. They’re rarely open to suggestion. Or change. English clients think they are sophisticated, visually. It makes it hard to exist as a service - they seem to know the way it should be done already.
MJ: Do you think that some of the larger international projects in the new book might make some English clients think again about you?
NB: No, not at all. Client searching was nowhere in my thinking at all for this book. The point of the book is because we’re going through a kind of revolution to do with realising that the computer is not a tool, it’s actually the medium itself. It was introduced as a tool of production, but then comes the logical jump; if you’re producing the stuff on screen, why not leave it on screen?
MJ: I remember Malcolm Garret saying that it got to a point on a project when he could never decide to make something look pixellated or not.
NB: No, you don’t make something look pixellated unless it suits the brief. You don’t use the computer in such a way to say ‘this is being done on a computer’.
MJ: In your more recent work though, the technology has often been visible. You haven’t tried to hide it.
NB: I’ve just incorporated it as part of the creative process.
MJ: But you can almost date the transformation of graphic design by updates in the various programs?
NB: Almost, yes. I think that phase of ‘using the new tricks’ is just about over though. We’re at the point when if you blur something, people say ‘that’s a blur filter’ so then you have to look beyond that to the content.
MJ: A friend of mine said to me once he thought that computers made good designers better, and bad designers worse. What do you think?
NB: That’s bullshit. Does a typewriter make a writer better?
I like the fact that it’s given design tools to people that are untrained - that a church magazine can actually look fairly decent. It’s a levelling tool , because it makes it harder for people to be good; they can’t hide behind tricks any more.
MJ: You seem to be working in a more modernist way with your German clients, whilst in Japan the boundaries seem to be limitless.
NB: That’s not strictly true. Some of the main signage work in Germany needed fairly structural elements - if I did a signage system in England it would be fairly structural. Yes, the work with Premiere television is fairly modernist but you have to look at that within the context of modern television graphics; there were no flying 3-D logos or anything - we just stripped it back to information. It is true to say that the Japanese clients tend to bring in creative people for their creativity and are disappointed if you haven’t pushed the boundaries.
MJ: How do you work on a day to day basis with your clients?
NB: The first thing we do is insist that they get in-house macintoshes. The second thing is that we insist that they have an in-house designer. Otherwise we say that we’re not going to proceed: we don’t want to do the donkey work. Financially and creatively it makes a lot of sense because it enables us to work with more people, being a small studio.
MJ: Your typefaces, or certainly the ones you’ve designed this decade are very personal. When you see them used elsewhere, how do you feel?
NB: It depends how they’re used.
MJ: Well, they are very much part of you, aren’t they?
NB: Well, yes, they’re very expressive. If they’ve taken one of the Fuse typefaces and used them commercially I’d laugh - the point of Fuse is that it’s an ongoing discussion, these aren’t meant to be cheap logo fonts.
MJ: All the recession really did was to weed out the badly organised or the uncreative design groups. In many respects the old guard are still there. How do you feel about them now?
NB: Oh fine. There’s a place for those people - the clients they work for, I could never work for. Somebody has to do that work. The fact that they refuse to acknowledge the changes that are going on will become a huge problem. Art directors at Pentagram are not hands on with the computers, and for me this is a completely bizarre scenario. Sooner or later their clients will be computerised, and they won‘t be.
MJ: What did you think of Peter Saville’s joining and departing, almost in the same breath?
NB: What a great story. A boys own adventure story. On paper the marriage might have worked, but in real life soap opera, with personal animosities and jealousies, obviously it didn’t. Bringing Peter in was clearly an attempt to modernise, but clearly he wasn’t going to be incorporated.
MJ: Do you think that because your recent work hasn’t been seen, people are just going to go out and rip it off again?
NB: I hope this book’s harder to rip-off because it’s definitely about an attitude and I’ve intentionally kept the stylistic aspect down.
MJ: Your copyists have become international. I think there are some incredible similarities between your early computer work and what Fabien Baron went on to do at Interview.
NB: I’m extremely happy that you’ve spotted this.
MJ: I always thought it was glaringly obvious.
NB: I thought it was too. Graphic Design is like that. If an idea comes along that doesn’t look like other stuff, it does become appropriated. If you look at the work of Dumbar and Weingart, and how that became appropriated into early nineties design, no-one talked about the originators, they just talked about the emulators. What pisses me off is if someone else gets the credit. I didn’t invent that concept; for us it was a way of saying let’s try and force Helvetica to be creative and emotive. We were reviving a way of thinking, and someone like Fabien came along and in the beginning he did it all with Helvetica and Franklin, and now he does it with Bodoni.
MJ: I was interested in your project for the FontBureau, which strikes me as a classical solution.
NB: Well kind of, yes. I didn’t mind it echoing the roots of typography.
MJ: But a classic ‘ideas’ solution? You probably hate me saying that.
NB: No I don’t think so. At the root of all communication, you still have to have an idea. What people misinterpret is what an idea consists of. An idea can exist on a number of levels; a process is an idea if there’s a reason for doing it.
MJ: The ‘new’ generation seemed to be completely into process only. The process is everything.
NB: Yes but even Alan Fletcher’s work is extremely processed.
MJ: I’ve sat down and read this book, and it’s quite hard to read.
NB: I don’t mind people having to struggle with text and words.
MJ: But many of your readers will be primarily visually literate; if they have problems understanding it they’re just going to look at the pictures again.
NB: Yeah, I know... but with the last book, most people’s criticism was ‘great pictures, why did you have the words in it’? I don’t mind because ultimately we had a lot of positive responses to the text of the first book.
MJ: There’s a phrase on the dustjacket of the new book that I’m struggling with; ‘the book suggests a framework to empower us with the ability to transform our language’
NB: The idea of the new technology is that it hands back the power to individuals to control their own visual language, it takes it away from an elitist, protectionist design industry. The computer is like a camera - portrait painting used to be a protectionist industry, but now anyone can go and take a picture. In a way the computer’s doing the same thing. The book is trying to explore some of these new possibilities, the old adage of the computer as an empowerment tool.
Who knows where it’s going to go.
The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2 was released in September 1994. This piece originally appeared in Design Week magazine.
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10.02.09
Peter Saville, eleven years later
A recent clear-out of old computers and hard drives revealed a clutch of old articles and interviews from the nineties that make interesting reading, a decade later. There follows an article about Peter Saville, as he tried to figure out what lay ahead after a troublesome nineties. So far, this really hasn’t been Peter Saville’s decade. In comparison to the eighties, which kicked off with a pencil-case full of D&AD silvers and countless groundbreaking projects, the nineties have been a bit stop-start, to say the least.
The decade started with a spell as a Pentagram partner, an ill-fated year in Los Angeles, followed by a year of doing very little, followed by a few months in the corner of Tomato’s office. Only recently has he established a secure London base and anything like the regularity of projects that we associate with his eighties reign.
But many designers and art directors who studied in the eighties will cite him as a seminal figure, the third prong of the Brody – Garret – Saville triumvirate which dared to question all that was assumed about graphic design, and turn much of it on its head. If Saville felt that neon was the way to go, then off he went. If he felt it was time to appropriate De Chirico, then why not. If he felt that obscure sixties Dutch modernist typefaces were worthy of a come-back, come on down. And his choice of influence or element always seemed just that one step ahead of the pack.
So it was with this in mind that I spent a couple of hours in his ‘homage to shag-pile and tinted glass’ Mayfair apartment a few weeks ago, trying to find out a bit more about what’s been going on. You have to put this decade into context first by going back to the last. The demise of Peter Saville Associates (PSA) at the end of the eighties and the experience of running a company that runs out of financial steam has clearly left quite a mark. ‘You get on a wheel, like a hampster in a cage and it’s impractical to get off, unless you fall off like I did’, he comments, ruefully.
The lifeline out of debt and tax fines was a remarkable one – the offer of a partnership at Pentagram. The ‘establishment’ had finally called, and Saville was ready to talk. Whilst he, Neville Brody and Malcolm Garret had discussed a ‘Pentagram’ of their own not long previously (apparently vetoed by Brody), the offer of help, friendship and indeed an open cheque book from Notting Hill proved irresistible to him as his studio became one the recession’s first victims.
But Saville’s views on how the organisation could and should adapt to the changing world seemed to fall on deaf ears, and he found his clientelle unable to meet the fees that the ‘rules’ of the partnership applied at that time.
‘I thought I was there as an emissary of change, but they chose to see me as reassurance that everything was OK’ says Saville, as if Pentagram were saying ‘if this guy was prepared to join us then we were right all along’. It wasn’t a huge surprise, but a disappointment to many when he and Brett Wickens (his long time associate at that time) found themselves looking for something new after two years.
They thought they had found the solution by going to Hollywood. Saville found a good listener in Aubrey Balkind at Frankfurt Balkind, who was willing to fund an adventure into Saville’s ‘Hollywood/multimedia dream’ which never really explained itself to anyone. After a year, this too became a dead end for all parties. On his return to Europe in the mid-nineties, Saville spent a whole year doing practically nothing, which he now views as strangely cathartic. ‘There were some nice moments in that period, but it also meant having no studio, no equipment, no money, no home, no bank account, no anything really’.
Then in 1996, following the pattern of two and three year cycles that this decade has taken for him, he met one of the founders of Meiré and Meiré, the German based advertising agency who were willing to sponsor him to set up a studio in Mayfair in return for his help on some joint projects.
So that’s the whistle-stop history tour. The question is, what has he been up to for the last two years? Well, his past continues to follow him around, and ring up for help. Work for old friends like New Order and Monaco has continued throughout the decade, and last year saw a boxed set of re-released work by Joy Division (it was his first sleeves for them that first put his name on the design map). And a new generation of stars like Brett Anderson of Suede, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Goldie have tracked him down and involved him in their projects.
Did he think he would still be doing record sleeves in his forties? ‘I said to myself when I was 28 that this is not a job to be doing in your thirties, and certainly not in your forties. They’re tricky, they’re very demanding and if you have a reputation you have absolutely nothing to gain by doing another one, unless you happen to do it really well’.
And what about Mark Farrow’s work, who has often cited Saville as a major influence and who in many people’s eyes has picked up with record sleeves where Saville left off? He is diplomatic with his response. ‘I admire the commitment and thoroughness with which he has continued a genre of work, channelled exterior influences and used them consistently’. But he cannot resist another jab at the whole process of design-for-music ‘...it is an activity which in itself is a waste of time, a pointless and inappropriate activity, which is why nobody is interested in doing it for more than ten years’.
As regards the rest at the ‘cutting edge’ (now there’s an over-used phrase) of nineties design Saville obviously has strong feelings on this subject; ‘what I have seen going on in the field of communications is an awful lot of ‘play-art’ from people such as Tomato. My feeling is that if you’re going to make art, than make art. You can’t masquerade as a kind of part-time artist through the crutch of your commercial work. The whole point of art is that you’re going to do it anyway, you don’t need a client’s brief’.
Art of course is closer to Saville’s heart than most, ever since a series of American painters revealed ten years ago how much his New Order sleeves had influenced them. Indeed Robert Longo tried to persuade him to become a ‘proper’ artist full time and this thought has clearly gnawed away at him ever since.
Away from music, another source of income for Saville has been fashion, where his work with Yohji Yamamoto in the eighties and long time photographic collaborator Nick Knight has led to art direction commissions from Jil Sander and Christian Dior. Throw in occasional consultancy contracts from the likes of ABC television and Mandarina Duck and things do start to sound a lot rosier.
His increasing role as a project art director has helped him re-appraise his Pentagram experience, and he is the first to admit that he learned a great deal from the experience. ‘Almost every day my experiences at Pentagram are useful. Without it I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t have any direction and I’m very grateful. I actually got an awful lot from it’.
Pentagram themselves seem to have learned from the ‘Saville experience’ by adjusting the financial commitments to younger partners,. Unsurprisingly Saville himself is quite critical of the more recent appointments as partner by the London office, feeling that a designer should have a clear approach, body of work and philosophy before become a Pentagram partner, not after.
As he involves himself more and more in consultancy and art direction and refuses to load himself up with the baggage of studios and employees and rent he is moving himself into a new type of design ‘consultant’ role altogether. One that doesn’t really need any of those commitments. Just someone who is there. Again he recalls Pentagram: ‘throughout my time there John McConnell was by far the most profitable partner there with just two designers and a secretary, billing a huge amount by building a portfolio of clients who just paid him to be him, and not necessarily designing anything’.
He has to get over the financial hurdle first – a few record sleeves, a spot of art direction and a couple of books just doesn’t seem to pay the bills, and by a mixture of unwillingness to pursue them and lack of historical contacts, Saville just doesn’t have many corporate contacts to provide him with any kind of bread and butter. And he needs some sort of filter for his work. ‘I haven’t published a book, I don’t have an agent, I don’t have a manager. I always need interfaces, I need somebody to say ‘you should speak to Peter about that’.
Clearly, after PSA’s insolvency, his departure from both Pentagram and Frankfurt Balkind and his admitted difficulty in keeping his currently venture in the black, something needs to change.With the lease on his current studio up for review this year, we may see him moving on again, who knows. The sense I get is that he rather enjoys his newly found nomadic role. Let’s just hope he can pay the bills on the next caravan. Written for Design Week magazine in 1998 by Michael Johnson. Life was soon to improve, with an exhibition at the Design Museum, an accompanying book and Saville’s appointment as the city of Manchester’s design consultant.
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05.02.09
Pixellated pragmatism
I can’t really put my finger on when exactly. But at some point in the last 2 or 3 years, the web stopped being new and just started being, well, there. We all worked out what it did, took it into our lives and absorbed it into the everyday to, fro, hubble and bubble of the 21st century.
So now it’s become less important for a website to say HEY YOU LOOK AT ME, and much more important to say ‘what can I help you find?’ We use the web to find or read stuff, quickly. It hasn’t stopped us going to movies, watching TV, or reading books. It’s just added to these things. My tweenage son uploads movies of his guitar playing onto Facebook. My other half plays Tetris on her iPhone whilst we catch two month-old dramas recorded on a TVR, fast forwarding through old Xmas ads. Am I surprised? Not really.
But the implications of this are profound: not only for those producing those fast-forwarded ads, but for those designing online. Of course you can show off with some whiz-bang flash or video graphics, but the effect soon wears off. A few years ago the Habitat site was an award-winning, immersive, 3d environment. Now? It’s a site where you go to look at rugs. Or buy a chair. It works fine, of course, it’s got a retail job to do, but that’s it. 
Unveiling a huge, bells-and-whistles animated site is now unusual – the last agency site of note was Wieden and Kennedy’s impressive wk.com site last year, and hours can be spent lost in its spider diagram/timeline navigation. 
But, have you really got the time? Many will give it just ten minutes before frustration kicks in and they jump to one of Wieden’s (very good) blogs. Wieden’s London office are obviously equally frustrated, and this week launched their own site that just shows you their work, quickly. Just for interest I revisited Leo Burnett’s gold-pencil-winning website this week, and once you’ve rung that bell and blown the whistle, it just seems a bit annoying. 
Many now argue for the polar opposite of the immersive animated approach. Partly driven by accessibility issues (ie ‘what does it look like with pictures and flash turned off?’), blogging (which needs page URL’s in order to link to something) and good old fashioned speed, sites get simpler and simpler. If you’re wondering why so many look like weblogs, it’s because they’re often adapted from blog software. So much can be hosted on photography and video sites that the US creative agency Modernista skipped the idea of a hosted site altogether and simply placed a tiny block of navigation in the corner of a page. 
This links a visitor to an information page on Wikipedia (albeit not quite as neatly as it once did), or their press ads on Flickr, TV on YouTube, and so on. If anyone was searching for a definition of what ‘web 2.0 thinking’ looked like, surely this was it. (Shame these thoughts are wasted on clients like Hummer and Cadillac, really). 
Modernista’s joke was a good one, but one ultimately undone by the achilles heel of ‘web 2.0’: these ‘public’ sites often look awful. It’s patently obvious that the next step in decent web design is to make simple ‘content management systems’ (CMS) or blog based systems vaguely attractive. Currently, it’s tough to break the mould; designing purely for HTML forces art directors back into gridded boxes and limited typeface choices. Include too many pictures and the usability police will lock you up. (And don’t even think about angled type). Because so many sites like Amazon’s have had ever-present, top-down and side ‘navigation’ for so long it’s hard to persuade clients otherwise. The ‘rules’ are starting to stick.
As ex-D&AD President Simon Waterfall admitted, ‘People don’t want to be entertained as much as serviced. Online art direction is now subservient to purpose and in an economic crunch clients want returns, not rewards from D&AD’. You can see this shift in how Poke’s work has changed - once its Alexander McQueen site was a slow loading but beautiful experience. Now? It’s still elegant, but it’s job is to sell. 
Their TopShop site doesn’t look like much but takes huge amounts of cash, because it works, and offers fast, rotating views of keenly priced clothes. It’s unsurprising that many established interactive agencies like All of Us and Digit are just as keen on installation design, a chance to avoid the pitfalls of online and flex their muscles.
In the short term, at least, things will keep simplifying. If web design has become semi-skimmed, it becomes skinnier still when you consider designing for mobile devices. A recent ad-hoc survey showed that just 6 out 50 US retailers had sites optimised for iPhone screens, surely a stat destined to change. Many of us will admire the elegant layout of a site like Monocle magazine’s... 
...but in the time it takes to load you could scan most of the intentionally un-designed, not-changed-for-years Drudge report, or the front page of the New York Times online. But there are still high-fat, high broadband delights on offer. The US 3G network Sprint recently unveiled a fabulous stat-based ‘widget’ site that offers a panoply of statistical delights ticking over in real time in front of your eyes, taking live research and feeds from around the world whilst showing you the ‘top words being used online’ or documenting the number of ‘transplants today’. Marvellous. If we’re trying to adjust to a low-fat world, we’re going to need the occasional indulgence like this, every now and again. 
This is an adaptation of a recent article for Design Week magazine by Michael Johnson
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02.02.09
February Timepieces
Recent time pieces have been flooding in. A certain Mr Mike Dempsey sent the observation above, made in 2001, about squeezing more time into the day. Petar Pavlov sent us these with this description: ‘I take a video (or an image that oscillates in time), position the frames in a three-dimensional space, and then try to capture the right angle’. 
Lovely. You can see few more experiments here. Julie Cloutier sent us a collaborative project with Alexis Petty; a typographic exploration of the conventional representation of the days of the week, month, and year. There’s more here. 
Kathryn Lewis sent us these, with this explanation: ‘It was a visual language I came up with by creating photograms with folded pieces of tracing paper. I made a little experiment and spent a whole day avoiding clocks, but recording how disorientated I felt at specific points in the day (eg. waking up, going to a lecture) and each photogram represents those points: the more shattered the photogram, the more disorientated I was feeling’. 
Tara Woolnough, a 3rd year Graphic Design student at Kingston University came across one of the first Marks and Spencer paper carrier bags when helping her Grandmother with a big clear up. 
Simon Sharville saw this as he passed a restaurant. (Very nice). 
And Ken Li was also thinking about clocks, at about 3.30 one afternoon. 
This project stems from a section on our main site dedicated to people’s responses to an open brief of Time. Feel free to send us your ideas (info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk), the best ones are posted here on Thought for the week.
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