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05.02.10
iPonderings
It’s hard to believe that it’s still less just a week since the iPad was launched. Steve Jobs says it’s like ‘holding the internet in your hands’. Critics have compared it to Barack Obama, as living up to impossible expectations (or not). Bloggers have (mainly) savaged it, but they of course savaged the iPhone too. Stephen Fry, somewhat breathlessly, thinks Jack Bauer will want to return just to download schematics onto it. The Economist has gone all religious on us, and whilst asserting that ‘some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them’ has declared that ‘even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles’. So there.
Meanwhile, UK advertising’s weekly bible, Campaign, asked johnson banks’ Michael Johnson to review it, from a design perspective. Here’s what he thought.
It’s a little tricky to review the iPad without actually having one in my hands. But, assuming that ringing doorbell is the FedEx man or an Amazon parcel (not a review copy from Jobs and Ive), I’ll try to do it, virtually.
From a product design perspective it’s clearly an extension of recent Apple themes. It shares the black and aluminium aesthetic that runs through their entire product line. It’s very thin – amazingly only 1mm thicker than an iPhone.
Size-wise, it initially disappoints (I’d hoped for something closer to A5), but to get an idea, fold your edition of Campaign in half, hold it upright and imagine that you’d lopped another 30mm off the bottom. (Or, if you’re a designer, fold Design Week in half, hold it upright and add an inch to the width)
The weight of it will be great. I’m writing this on a 15inch laptop, weighing almost 2.5 kg – the iPad will only weigh just over a quarter of that. If you want to cycle and run (or amble) to work, or are always dragging hefty laptops to meetings and airports, it could be a genuine game changer. And it’ll save on those physio sessions for broken shoulders.
If your idea of fun on a long flight is to boot up Photoshop and indulge in a bit of high end retouching then you’ll be disappointed, but you’d imagine that Adobe will be thinking hard about ‘CS 4 lite’ very soon.
Our Californian friends have been mainly re-purposing iPhone software for this new ‘third-way’ type of product (ie not phone, not laptop, but somewhere in-between). Put 6 iPhones together and you’re close to the size of the actual screen - you can see why the world’s suppliers of apps and games are genuinely excited. We’ve all done that irritating up-and-down-sizing of a website on a phone – all of that will be over if it’s as fast and as net-friendly as it seems in all the demos.
The family-friendly apps like photos, calendars and video have been re-designed for the bigger screen, but this isn’t just a home toy – the increasingly ubiquitous Keynote software has been re-jigged and made available at a very low price. You could do that next conference defiantly ‘hand-luggage only’. Forget the extra iPods and hardbacks, just whack the music on this, download some Malcolm Gladwell ebooks and order the room service.
My only reservation? Will I really be able to write on that keyboard? I hope so. But I’ll need a real one in my hands to really test that out, obviously. Purely for research, you understand.
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04.02.10
Demons out. Or we eat all the soya beans.
Obviously 2009 was a tricky year for lot of people, so what better way to cleanse all that away and drive away the evil spirits for the coming year. Cue Setsubun at johnson banks. Essentially the toshiotoko, or male head of the household... 
...gets to grab handfuls of roasted soyabeans... 
...and rather than eat them, chucks them at the rampaging ogres, shouting ‘Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!’ (‘Demons out! Luck in!’). 
Then you can pig out on the soyabeans, but only one for each year of your life. (Not sure about this rule, seems a little stingy to us.)
If you're looking for an easier option, the Maneki Neko (or Beckoning Cat) should bring your business good luck. (The cat's beckoning, not waving, by the way).
So, there you go. Roasted soya-bean-chucking and a small cat = new business coming out of your ears. Or something like that.
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02.02.10
Posters available, space needed, thoughts welcome
A serious new year clear-up has made us realise just how many posters we have in the archive that we designed for La Villette. Over a seven year period from 2000 to 2007, we designed hundreds of items every year for the cultural park in the north-east of Paris. A great project to work on, and the highlight was the posters - major events each had their own bespoke designs, 1.5 metres tall and a metre wide. 
We’re not entirely sure how many we did, probably hundreds, but it’s struck us as we sort through them that there must be between thirty and fifty of them that are pretty reasonable. 
We think they’d make a great exhibit of some description, but we’d need a huge space to do it. Then it occurred that our Thought for the Week readers might have some suggestions?
Long shot, obviously, but if you're interested in exhibiting 50 massive French cultural posters, or know someone who might, drop us a line at info(at)johnsonbanks(dot)co(dot)uk. Ta. This post from a while ago shows some of the highlights of the series.
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30.01.10
Science and skating
The past week has seen various attempts by team johnson banks to get away from our desks and banish those January blues. We were there for the end of ‘Skate’ at Somerset House, practicing our synchronised skating routines. 
They’re coming on pretty well. 
After that came a visit to the Science Museum for its monthly ‘Late’ night where children are banned, there are four bars and 3,000 twenty-and-thirty-somethings descend on one of London’s favourite institutions. They’ve become amazingly popular evenings. In between discussing quantum physics over Bacardi breezers (or maybe the quantum physics of a Bacardi breezer), there are chances to visit Launch Pad without tripping over the buggies, discover whether its lifts really can hold 24 people... 
...do the quiz night and enter the colouring in competition. Runners-up in that, sadly. Must try harder. 
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28.01.10
The Beatles in Computer Arts magazine
Late last year we were asked to make some notes and gather some images on how our Beatles stamps came about. We duly did what we were asked and collated some images, assuming it would maybe a page of text and some little pictures. 
Consequently, there’s some surprise at johnson banks towers that the piece is, er, 6 pages long. Interspersed with proper images there are what were tiny scribbles of unsuccessful routes (like ‘exploring lyrics’) blown up a little larger than expected. Whoops. Still. Looks OK. Ish.
The piece appears in the January Edition of Computer Arts projects magazine.
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