Several people have been lobbying hard for a book on Gorham for some time, but the project stalled due to lack of funding. The prime movers in the book research, Beryl McAlhone and Howard Brown, have agreed that some selected highlights of that project could appear here, so over the next few weeks we’re going to show some of the projects, and the tales and stories that were gathered as research for the book.
Exhibit one: that classic poster, followed by Gorham’s memories of its creation.
John Gorham I have learned over years of experience that you cannot consciously come up with a witty idea. It is a subconscious process. You have to rely on your brain to work for you. The answer often comes from something accidental. A good example is the poster I did with Howard Brown for the Jack Gold film Red Monarch, a black comedy about Stalin. As we were chatting after the private screening in Soho, Howard suggested it might be quite interesting to put a red nose on Stalin. I liked that, because the guy was a clown. But he was a tyrant as well, so I knew a red nose wasn’t enough.
We were walking back along Old Compton Street when I suddenly knew what it ought to be. A tomato. Somebody has thrown a tomato at the image of a tyrant, and it ends up hitting his nose. That gets over the two opposing elements, the political and comic, and brings them together.
I don’t think the tomato idea would ever have happened to me if I hadn’t bought a book of Michael English’s pop paintings a few weeks earlier. One image fascinated me – a tomato splattered on a wall with pips and juice dripping down. That image was somewhere in my mind, and when I was thinking about this problem, my mind picked it up. What is lovely about solving jobs this way is that a graphic idea will formulate its own way of putting down an image. Ideas seldom repeat themselves in terms of technique. The technique comes from the idea, so it is fresh. Another plus for this kind of thinking is that you get such fun out of it. You entertain yourself. I have had many thrilling moments of sheer elation.
David Puttnam When John brought in the rough for Red Monarch, I remember thinking, if only the movie was as good as the poster, we’d be in great shape.
Howard Brown At the Cannes Film Festival, the producer told us they had a hard time keeping enough Red Monarch posters on the streets. People kept tearing them down and taking them home.
At first sight their reception space seems more like a storeroom, until we realised that they simply were displaying their most prized models, on top of their packing cases. A sort of public storeroom, if you like.
It creates a really interesting effect, with these intricate and highly detailed, cased trophies sitting on top of crude, ‘this-way-up’ sticker-emblazoned timber boxes.
Fantastic. And left us feeling rather two-dimensional.
Having pored over Malcolm Gladwell’s first two books (The Tipping Point and Blink) I’d eagerly bought his newest, Outliers, in hardback. But several reviewers chipped away at it, and its central premise, namely that genius isn’t necessarily born, but cultivated by circumstance, luck and good old-fashioned hard graft. So I delayed reading it, until last week and of course the reviewers are wrong - Gladwell has delivered again.
The most memorable of his memes this time around is a recurring stat in the background of the world’s most successful people. It’s a simple one: the 10,000 hour rule.
Bill Gates put in thousands of hours as a teenager learning to code on huge university machines. The Beatles spent years in Hamburg playing eight hour gigs and came back to England perfectly formed. Away from Gladwell but still relevant, jazz is crammed with examples of virtuoso guitarists and saxophonists who honed natural promise with years and years of relentless practice. Even modern day musicians admit that they learned their craft the hard way: Rage against the Machine’s Tom Morello was at Harvard by day but spent 8 hours every night learning how to play in his own unique style.
But what about designers? As I read Gladwell’s thesis, I kept wondering whether Gladwell’s theories carry over. Do designer’s emerge fully formed out of college with 10,000 hours under their belt, geniuses in waiting?
Well, let’s think – a student in the UK might devote 10 weeks to graphics at foundation, and then in theory, 90 weeks in a three year course. How many hours a week? Let’s make our average student quite conscientious and make them work an 8 hour day. That’s 4,000 hours in total. So if they’ve been a normal, fairly dutiful student for 4 years (but still taken holidays and put their feet up at Easter and Xmas) they’d come out of college having only just scratched the surface of the necessary 10,000.
This quick bit of maths obviously doesn’t cater for the keen-beans who then go on and do an MA. Imagine a design-boffin who works 6 days a week, 9 hours a day and only takes 4 weeks off the whole year, and keeps that up for five years? Number of hours = 12,960. Phew, instant genius (and that’s not even counting their foundation course). But does every graduate of every MA design course go on to become the next Jonathan Ive or Neville Brody? Probably not - there must be other factors at hand.
Gladwell points out some of these, like lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. Bill Gates gained access to computers before many others, but was also born at a time when opportunities opened up for him alone in his late-teens.
In graphic design, Alan Fletcher, Colin Birdsall and Bob Gill set up their company in early sixties London when there were virtually no other ideas-based design companies in existence. Wolff and Olins met a few years later and immediately realised no-one in the UK could offer their combination of business thought and creative insight. Why Not Associates met at the RCA, absorbed Gert Dumbar’s teaching and graduated fully-formed in the late eighties, their signature style differentiating them almost immediately from London’s dull ‘corporate’ designers of the day. The recession of the early nineties claimed many victims in the design business, so when the now world-beating Turner Duckworth set up in 1992, they were virtually the only start-up that year.
Whilst every few years, a fully formed design group emerges from courses like the RCA, for most of Britain’s designers a different set of rules seem to apply in design. Although a deeply unfashionable doctrine, it still seems to hold that a good four or five years after graduation is needed for a designer to begin to find their feet (usually by their late-twenties).
Designer Siobhan Keaney once said to me that ‘designers learn in their twenties, make their mark in their thirties, and consolidate in their forties’. When she said this, I was in my twenties and of course firmly believed that everything I produced was the best thing since sliced bread. In retrospect, there are about 2 and bit projects from my twenties that I would even consider showing anyone and the rest should be left to grow mould in the metaphorical bin. It became clear that some serious work at the design coalface was needed before standing any chance of creating anything genuinely new (and get anywhere near those 10,000 hours).
Students reading this might be appalled that they might not get really into their stride for another decade. But consider this – Alan Fletcher was in his thirties when he set up FFG, and was forty when he co-started Pentagram. Hardly a spring chicken. As for what happens after your forties, Weiden + Kennedy London partner Tony Davidson offered this thought: ‘It’s hard when you get older. Your energy levels go down. You refer back to what you know. You become less of a dreamer and more of a realist. My favourite creative folks are the ones who have the ability to keep their minds young and continue to challenge themselves late into their careers.’
But returning to the original thesis – are great designers born or nurtured? Michael Wolff had these observations. ‘We’re the sum of our genetics and also how we choose to interpret the influences of our environment - who we meet, or love, or want to be like, or envy. Like chimps, we’re insatiable mimics and like human beings we crave approval and admiration. If we’re lucky enough to envy the most relevant and effective people on our journeys, our influences and inspirations work well for us. And if we’re lucky with our DNA that’s helpful too. Not sure where or how creativity that’s innately our own gets developed, or if time does make much difference other than to reveal what we think of as embarrassments and mistakes that we choose not to repeat’.
Alan Dye, of London’s NB Studio, feels that ‘anyone with 10,000 hours of practice would be good at anything, but I truly believe you can’t make a great designer, it has to part of you, run in your blood. You need the spark, the intuition and the rest of the cliches.’
One thing is common to the designers who break through – a determination and willingness to keep trying, day after day, to find something new. As Jessica Helfand remarked to me, ‘strength of personality is huge’ - as she pointed out the sheer doggedness of the handful of designers I’d asked for their opinion on this.
And it’s still true, I think, that anyone can break into this business, if you’re determined enough. But Gladwell’s right: it doesn’t happen overnight and short-circuiting the process rarely works. Those 10,000 hours have to happen and are embedded in the foundations of most of the best designer’s careers. As for the lucky breaks along the way (or how to create your own luck), well perhaps that’s the subject of his next book.
By Michael Johnson
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell is available here in hardback. The author discusses the book itself here.
Here are some of the recent ‘timepieces’ submitted in the last couple of months.
Andy Kidd has been busy, musing on the world’s time zones (above and below)...
...and also commentating on the the meltdown in the world’s financial markets.
Natalie Talbot has been making posters out of hama beads for a project - ‘I thought about how tiny they were and how long it would take to count the buggers!’ Good point Natalie.
Matthew Herz took this photo of a ‘building is losing a battle to time. New materials prop it up as if it needs crutches, a walker, hip replacement surgery.’
Meanhwile Cameron Byerley has been photographing pendulums (as you do). ‘The pendulum swings erratically according to no set pattern. It's position can't be predicted as a function of time. It's position can be captured as hundreds of images and the probability of where it will be at any given time is given by the darkness of the color in the photo’.
Meanwhile, a big clear-up at a Johnson shed has revealed johnson junior’s decade of cricket bats. Trouble is, he’s still not that great at cricket.
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.
Swanswell is a drug and alcohol rehabilitation service based across the Midlands in the UK. When the trust approached us last year with their chosen, legacy name, we were a little unsure at first until we began to see that the ‘well’ at the end of the word could be of use.
Various typographic experiments followed, before the discovery that a piece of paper, crumpled at one end, could act as a suitable metaphor for someone’s life smoothing itself out.
We agreed with the client that it would be best if there were several different versions of the logo, in varying degrees of ‘crumple’, so we’ve agreed on six.
We’ve also developed a family of useful words and phrases that can be used as headlines and copy for posters and leaflets. Here’s an example.
Here are some of them used on a poster.
One of the most intriguing applications is their business cards. A little disappointed when shown traditional cards, we then showed them a rather more unusual idea. Each employee receives a small book of one colour cards...
...and when they want to give out a card, they remove one from the pad, scrunch one end, then hand over a carefully crumpled business card, a physical demonstration of their logo (and service) first-hand.
Another part of the scheme will be a suite of photos that we’ve taken of crumpled family situations. Drug and alcohol dependence places great pressure on families and relationships, so we decided it would be useful to have images like these, for certain applications (although we have to use them with care).
Here are more posters and stationery.
The scheme started to roll-out late last year, and more and more applications are coming through now. We’re working on some stop-frame animations too, here’s a quick sample. Apologies for the slightly crude embedding.
Thanks to our project partners on the Swanswell project, Brand Guardians. The project photographers were Alex Kent and Pete Gay, animaton images by Andrew Penketh.
For this year’s Christian Aid week (which starts in the UK this Sunday) we’ve developed an unusual theme where Christian Aid’s envelope-based logo has become a blood bag.
Christian Aid Week is Britain’s longest running fundraising week, having started in 1957, and raises around £15 million for the charity every year.
A thin red line of blood-red ink then connects the typographic headlines and is used as a linking device in all the print we’ve developed for the campaign (see below).
This work builds on work we carried out two years ago in 2007 when we turned the logo into a grow-bag and followed a general ‘gardening’ and cultivation theme.
The Christian Aid Week envelope is still one of the charity’s most powerful fundraising tools: 17.5 million of these envelopes will be distributed over the coming week.
We’ve just received a series of images from last week’s Blank Canvas event, where various designers from around the world customised junk objects found in charity shops.
The eventual list of participants was pretty good, and included a customised skateboard by Milton Glaser and LA art gurus Kozyndan’s adaptation of a Marilyn photo...
...Supermundane’s super teapot...
...and various American Pentagram partners’ offerings (here’s Paula Scher’s customised teapot).
In total just over £2,500 was raised for Ravensbourne College’s Moving Image and Graphics department final show.
Highest sale on the night was ICO’s ‘The Scream’, which sold for £140. As organiser Megan Riera told us, ‘I had given them a framed print of Munch's The Scream, and they had it reframed and painted it completely white except for a small black box which had the word's 'The Scream by Edvard Munch’ written in miniscule letters. When you got up close to read it, a motion sensor was triggered, and a series of blood curdling screams were let out!’
With some sneaky silent bidding we managed to buy Michael Bierut’s Sak’s-like-Oxo-cube-like remix of on a old OXO poster. Just over 100 English pounds. Bargain.
Well done to Ravensbourne for pulling it off, and as all agreed, next year it would be nice to have a little more time to exhibit, see everything properly and do some cannier bidding. But a great start.
Last week saw The Art Directors Club of New York give out their prizes, and our odd ‘barrel art’ project for Glenfiddich from last year won a bronze ‘cube’.
It’s a project that sits outside the normal design classificiations so we’re pleasantly surprised to see that it’s doing well in competitions. Last week it was accepted twice into the D&AD Annual and also Creative Review’s annual round-up of work.
