24.03.10
Photoshop, the verb

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Before I sat down to write this I hoovered the carpet. This morning I googled a couple of recipes. Yesterday I photoshopped some family photos.

What’s wrong with that paragraph? Well, nothing, really, apart from the 3 product names that are so ubiquitous they’ve become verbs.

For twenty years, Photoshop® has been used to manipulate, retouch, stretch, distort and beautify. It’s the only computer program regularly mentioned in the media.

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We’re drawn into newspaper discussions of manipulated imagery, or if David Cameron’s face should have been airbrushed quite so much on that infamous poster. Defence ministry’s can, er, ‘enhance’ their evidence of missiles. Judges of photographic competitions make on-the-spot decisions about whether an image is ‘real’ or not. It’s everywhere. Adobe’s lawyers must be seriously worried that its carefully protected ® is in serious danger of being hoovered away.

Oddly though, it's hard to feel that much affection for it. Such is its ubiquity, we take it for granted. For a program celebrating its 20th birthday, it’s hard to find anyone with anything positive to say about it, and hard to find evidence that anyone is using it in a way that will make the hairs stand up in the back of your neck.

Once, photo retouching was an expensive and time consuming business. High-end Quantel machines demanded hundreds of pounds an hour for their services. Retouching bills well into the thousands were de rigeur - purely from an accounting perspective, it’s had a massive effect on creative businesses and in many ways we couldn’t function without it. It has been at the forefront of countless design trends: the introduction of effects like the ‘blur’ filter brought a tsunami of designs with it. Of course, each of these approaches became instantaneously dated, visibly ‘franked’ by the chosen trick from the magicians hat, but that didn’t stop many from riding each wave as it passed.

Perhaps because it’s never had a head-to-head rival, its monopoly has created few acolytes. Whilst the Pagemaker/Quark/Indesign debate fostered loyalties on all sides (and even now the Illustrator/Freehand debate continues, 134 comments later) Photoshop has been everpresent, the everyday airbrush we take for granted.

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Paradoxically, our memories of older projects seem slightly rose-tinted. Much more had to be done ‘in-camera’ – this led to happy accidents, angles and ideas that probably would never have come by just looking at a screen. Why Not Associates’ Andy Altmann remembers this fondly: ‘in our early work we were embracing the spontaneous moments we achieved when we placed an object in front of some lights, coloured gels and 35mm projections. We never quite knew what to expect. It was always a surprise and a wonder’.

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The incredible panoramas and images created by 60s and 70s sleeve designers and art directors (think Pink Floyd sleeves and B&H ads) involved painstaking tinting, dyeing, stripping in and retouching. There’s a magic to these projects that’s hard to explain. Perhaps knowing they had been so laboriously created, their very impossibility made them more interesting.

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George Lois’s famously retouched Esquire covers from the sixties routinely sold magazines all on their own, no coverlines required.

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Pink Floyd tried as hard as they could to shoot their Battersea ‘pig’ in camera, only resorting to retouching it when the best pink animal and the perfect sky were clearly on different transparencies. For their designers, Hipgnosis, the cover for Wish You Were Here involved a burning man shaking hands. An idea photographed then, almost certainly retouched now.

This photographic process became close to creating a small work of art. Altmann admits that he will ‘still take great delight in showing students an old piece of work and saying ‘there is no photoshop used in creating this’, and looking at their faces questioning 'how the hell did they do that?’

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In its early days of development, certain digital photographic effects still had the power to shock. April Greiman’s decision to stretch her naked pixellated body all the way across a design was unprecedented and nearly blew up her computer in the process.

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Neville Brody’s experiments with alpha layers and typography? Saville and Wakefield’s waste paintings? Sagmeister’s Chaumont poster? All indebted to our pixellated friend.

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But these examples can feel quickly of their time. Sit a non-designer in front of it now and you’ll discover just how complex it’s become, with a baffling array of tools - the program either stands in the way of those happy accidents, or we’ve given up and looked elsewhere. Jonathan Barnbrook echoes this: ‘I want other pathways which create images that not everybody else is using. If it’s low tech, and difficult to do something, then that is part of the process. You should use the parameters of the tools with delight, rather than see it them as a hindrance. Beware of programmes that claim they can do everything’.

Malcolm Garrett feels that it’s part of the whole move towards a world of photography without film, processing or prints. ‘The digital camera has actually outshone Photoshop, because that's the bit we hold in our hands, and the bit that makes the pictures. That's the 'toy' we play with’.

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Apart from the occasional digital trickery of designers such as Non Format, another, newer wave of designers seem more interested in hand made, hand-drawn or geometric images – Photoshop is surely involved, somewhere, but its influence is behind the scenes, not front of stage.

Barnbrook himself is critical of Adobe’s pre-eminence - ‘The CS suite is too expensive and has now become an interface nightmare. The ‘endless possibilities' feeling has gone - lost under slow inconsistent palettes and pc like commands’. Meanwhile Garrett grudgingly appreciates it: ‘ironically, the fact that Photoshop is embedded in almost every aspect of the digital communications process, in a ubiquitous and somewhat seamless way, means that we really take it for granted. Because we'd be stuck without it, we hardly notice it's there. It's a bit like breathing, you can't stop and look at it, without choking. Expressing any kind of interest in such a brilliantly powerful piece of software is akin to fetishising over a Sable hair paintbrush, or the joy of mixing your own paint from raw pigment. It's a bit existential. And a bit weird’.

Younger designers such as Armin Vit are less critical: ‘it has created a new medium that any creative can exploit. Whether it's someone correcting breast sizes for a mainstream advertising campaign, or retouching the blotchy cheeks of a CEO for an annual report, or creating trippy illustrations with Photoshop effects, this little piece of software has empowered us to make our work better. That is, if you stay clear of the emboss filter’.

Paradoxically, the democratisation of a once difficult process has made it everyday, and expected. Perhaps soon a generation of designers who never knew what came ‘before’ will really show us an ‘after’. Perhaps. But Photoshop will need to surprise us again first.

This is an adaptation of a piece for this month’s Creative Review by Michael Johnson

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22.03.10
Pecha Kucha, Cardiff-style

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We’ll be in Cardiff later this week to take part in Wales’s first Pecha Kucha.

In case you don’t know, Pecha Kucha is the rapid fire slideshow event invented by our friends Klein Dytham in Tokyo that has spread like wildfire around the world. Originally developed by Dytham as a technique to stop his overly-wordy architecture students blathering on for much more than five minutes, it’s proving fantastically popular as an event in itself.

Whilst TED talks are famously under 20 minutes but allow for multiple thoughts, strands and threads, a PK talk doesn’t really allow for more than one thought, discussed for precisely 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And it's a serious test for even the most practiced of speakers.

Johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson, is one of the victims, and the full list is below. We’re especially keen to hear Chantal Coady, she of Rococo chocolate (on the Kings Road) fame, discussing her ‘Chocolate journey’.

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The event is this Thursday 25th March at Chapter, Market Road, Canton, Cinema 1. The doors open at 6pm, with the event itself 6.30-8pm.

PK Cardiff has been launched, and will be hosted by Louisa Cameron. There’s more information here and a post about the last Pecha Kucha we did, in Tokyo, here.

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18.03.10
What’s next for poster design?

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The following is a recent electronic conversation between design journalist Yolanda Zappaterra and Michael Johnson on the state and future of poster design.

YZ: Will there still be print posters in the future, and if so who and what will they be for and what do you envisage them being like?

MJ: I hope that there will still be a place for printed posters, they remain a powerful way for people to reach out to certain audiences. The trouble is, whilst a decade ago, we were designing poster sets for all manner of clients because that was a powerful way to communicate in classrooms, corridors or train stations (in our case), there seems to be much less interest now. Why spend 20 grand or more on a poster set (with its incumbent postage issues) when you can put the information on a website for half that? That, I’m afraid, are the harsh economics of the situation. We’ve had to look elsewhere for regular sources of work.

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Unfortunately we’re now surrounded by a dreadful standard of poster design, pretty much wherever you look. On the underground, endless ‘floating head’ cinema cross-track posters stare back at us and cultural institutions seem just happy to blow up a picture of the featured artists’ work then whack a logo in the corner.

Whilst the art of the poster still lives on in Holland and France, it seems that the poster in the UK barely stumbles along in student portfolios, gripped by hidden hands, usually showing a limited edition print of something inane like a cat drawing or a piece of geometric type. There’s very rarely a message, or a piece of genuine communication, if I’m honest.

But, on the positive side, there’s still a basic desire to print something out, wall-sized, stand back and just glory in the sheer scale of a poster. I don’t think that effect of scale will ever go away, that’s why I hope people will always love them. But I fear I’m in a minority.

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I like to think that as long as there are walls, there will be people producing posters to stick on them, and that there will always be a need for such a 'throwaway' yet eye-catching marketing and propaganda tool. Do you agree, or do you think that eventually even the tiniest theatres will replace posters with screen-based advertising?

The digital screens themselves won’t completely replace the original printed piece, I’m sure. But as the printed form becomes increasingly rare, the time and budget to allocate decent budgets to decent posters (and decent poster designers) will inevitably diminish. Already we’ve seen the downgrading of ‘design’ as advertising agencies have ring-fenced outdoor advertising for their needs. Often they’ll use blow up the print advert and go home early.

If posters are eventually replaced by Blade Runner-style multimedia and interactive screens (as is already happening in tube stations), what skills should graphic designers be learning to ensure they're equipped for and even be in a position to drive the changes?

We’re already at a transition point, where companies have sprung up whose ‘job’ it is to animate traditional ‘still’ posters into moving, dynamic images with varying degrees of success. What will start to happen soon is that designers and agency creatives will start to realise that having a ‘moving’ idea is just as important as the static idea. (I guess you could argue that all we’re talking about is a moving poster, not a static one). Trouble is, you often end up with movement for movement’s sake, a bit like the early days of web animations. Until creatives come to understand this new challenge, punters will just do the mental equivalent of ‘skip intro’ in the way we did with all those dreadful website splash pages.

But once the idea of a moving poster becomes the norm, then I hope we’ll see a new wave of compelling digital communication for these new channels.

Do you think the skills associated with print posters (understanding of DPI, working with large scale etc) are being lost by emerging designers, and if so what does that mean for the expression and dissemination of counter cultural and protest graphics?

I would imagine that some of those traditional skills will start to be lost, yes. If you don’t practice, you never learn, let’s face it. As a rule though, posters were always most successful in their simplest form – two or three colours, simple design. That’s not a huge technical requirement, to be honest.

There's evidence that in art and international design, interesting new directions are being forged that draw on and reference the art of poster design. Such innovation seems less apparent in the UK. Is that true do you think, and if so, why?

I think the ad agencies here are going through a confused patch – they’ve become so obsessed with social media that large scale ideas or technological wizardry are more likely to be seen abroad. But to be fair, clients are currently running a little scared. Because marketing departments still tend to turn to their agencies for their comms, and attention now flips between on-line and on-tv, ‘outdoor’ and hence posters seem to get slightly ignored.

The paradox of course is that Cameron’s infamous ‘airbrushed’ poster has been the story of the election so far, and there may yet be the traditional ‘battle of the posters’ as we get closer and closer to polling day. Posters remain a potent way to distil an idea or a thought down, and that will never go away. Interestingly though, many of the ones we will see will only run a few times, in selected sites, and the parties will rely on media coverage to turn them into ‘stories’. And it seems, already, that electronics will play a far greater role in this election than ever before.

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So, what’s next?

I think in design we’ll see a continued move to more DIY, limited edition runs. The ‘designer poster’ may go through a period when its only job is to decorate a wall, and its communication requirement will lessen even further.

Weirdly though, there really is a whole market out there for graphic/art posters – we’ve sold at least four hundred copies of our ‘Tree’ poster and it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more of this. People do love huge pieces of paper, they always have, and perhaps we’ll all start being more honest with ourselves about this.

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Last year there was the phenomenon of US designers creating posters for Obama – they just felt that they should. When you went to the site, you could just print out the pdfs at whatever size you wanted – the site visitor became the user/printer and even decided what size they wanted to make their ‘print’.

I keep coming back to the fact that all of the huge identity schemes we do now are almost always applied out onto posters in the early iterations – it remains one of the quickest ways to see if a headline, a picture and a logo can co-exist in an intriguing and memorable way. Even if it only continues to exist as a hypothetical exercise, it’s an exercise worth doing.

When taxi-drivers ask me what I do, to save long-winded explanations I usually say ‘logos, posters and stamps’. When you think about it, the common design link between all three is the need to communicate something very quickly with the minimum of means. Sure, one of them can be the size of a wall, and the others the size of a thumb-print, but I see no difference in the way I design any of them.

I once used to carry my portfolio around on slide, hoping for projectors when I arrived for interviews but quickly being reduced to a small lightbox (if I was lucky). Those years carrying a miniature portfolio proved to me that all ideas could be viewed 35mm across, irrespective of their actual, physical size. And all the great graphic designers whose work I carefully studied when younger were all consummate poster designers: Fletcher, Glaser, Scher. It was a right of passage to try and become half decent at designing them myself.

Zappaterra’s recent article on poster design, which draws on some of this conversation, appears in this week’s Design Week magazine.

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17.03.10
The letter O: discuss

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‘To lexicographers it’s just the 15th letter of the English alphabet. To designers it’s a perfect shape for treatment: a world, a ball, a ring, a sun, a moon, a clock, a compass, a face. It’s not even just a letter; it’s a number, too – if zero counts as a number. It’s a solid sphere or an empty circle’.

John Crace discusses and dissects the letter ‘O’ in today’s Guardian newspaper, with some additional insights from johnson banks’ creative director, Michael Johnson.

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16.03.10
27 bleak hours in Berlin

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At the end of last week we made a flying visit to Berlin. An evening and a morning was spent in good company discussing human rights (and the branding thereof), a few brief hours were snatched in the afternoon seeing ‘the sights’.

Truth is, looking back at the photos, you can see why one sage once quipped that Berlin was in danger of becoming the ‘remorse capital’.

Trying to keep costs down, we stayed in the Easyhotel, whose rooms are only inches wider than the bed. (Don’t turn over too quick else you’ll smack your head on the wall).

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The corridor lights are programmed to only light up when there’s someone there.

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The TV shows were kind of de-constructed.

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The caferia is, er, this.

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And whatever you do, don’t ask for another pillow.

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Kind of like one of those cute capsule hotels. Without the cute.

After we’d put the world’s human rights to, er, right, we toured the newish ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe’, the phenomenal outdoor sculpture originally by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra (before Serra pulled out) that endured years of controversy before finally making it into the world in 2005.

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Then it had to be a visit to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, frustratingly unfinished last time we were here in the late nineties. Quite something to finally see it, but we can see why so many people preferred to view it empty.

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200,000 people famously visited the space before it actually had any exhibits in it, such is the power of Libeskind’s architectural vision. (For readers interested in career paths and what things people did when in their lives, this was Libeskind's first major international building in 1999. He was 52).

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