|
Older |
Home
| Newer
14.08.07
Think, draw, do
Last year a friend contacted us with a book idea about ‘why designers draw’ and it was an interesting exercise in digging out sketchbooks and matching up incomprehensible scribbles with their solutions. The book doesn’t seem to have materialised, but seeing these marvellous ideas for a sketchbook series last week prompted me to dig out what I’d found. It’s worthwhile pointing out that I do still use sketchbooks. I keep them all together, they seem to go back until 1994. I’m not sure what I used before then. 
I of course stick pretty much to the designer’s favourite colour, as you can see, apart from that racy red one.
They’re not comprehesive by any means, but as record of what I was working on, and when, they’re pretty good. There’s definitely a trend recently for mine to become more notebook than sketchbook, but it was good to go back, looking to see how a scribble ended up in comparison to the final idea and what little gems I’d forgotten along the way.
One of the oldest is this initial drawing in 1994 for a show on William Morris. Throughout most of the 90s whacking two pictures together seemed to be everyone’s favourite trick. 
Luckily we found a more interesting way to do the transition for the real thing. (Actually I think we’d do it better now, but it was 1994, give us a break). 
Sometimes I’d find a sketch that seemed suspiciously finished (such as this from late ’96)... 
...but then find my workings out in an earlier book. 
The eventual product looked like this. 
This was an interesting find - a note from early 1997 for a British Icons clock, with my notes about having a famous duo like Wallace and Gromit at two, The Beatles at four, the Spice Girls at five, Sean Connery at seven, etc. 
The actual clock bears the scars of some tricky copyright discussions, The Beatles’ legendary reluctance to take part in anything like this and a decision that I still regret now, letting the Spice Girls go to four once Geri had left. A nice idea became instantly dated, as soon as I caved on that one. 
As I suspected, sometimes ideas that seemed a bit hopeless on paper, such as this poster about the ‘perfect student’... 
...seem to improve immensely when transferred to pixels. 
Some ideas seem to happen suspiciously quickly. My memory of doing More Th>n’s logo in 2000 was that it took an afternoon. I fear (on the evidence of my sketchbook) that it took about ten minutes. 
Trouble is, my tendency to date the books betrays my lack of confidence in some of the ideas. Here’s an early scribble for the Shelter logo, then another a month later. 
Then virtually the same scribbles two months later. 
It’s as though I didn’t believe that we’d got it, and kept looking for something sort of validation (or indeed, a better idea). 
One of our most famous projects seemed to grow (in the autumn of 2001) out of some weird cat scribbles... 
..then these jottings, fuelled as I remember by a lively discussion around the studio. 
Three years later, I remember devoting quite a lot of time to to persuading the Royal Mail to do a Christmas version of the Fruit and Veg stamps (unsuccessful, it must be said). It seemed to involved notes about christmas nuts and vegetables and little jottings of Santa’s beard and antlers (presumably the stickers?). 
These mad boggled-eyes faces were drawn in a cab as I left a meeting with an ad agency who had had a lovely thought about showing the ‘Merry’ and the ‘Down’ side of drinking Merrydown cider with reversible posters. 
They hadn’t asked us to do a poster, but I couldn’t stop myself. Luckily they liked it. 
In some cases I really like the page of drawings, everything looks very fluid and, well, designery. Take these scribbles and end result for a campaign about London as a republic, for Time Out. 
Sometimes the drawings go one way, whilst the end result was quite different. 
Sometimes it just looks like verbal jottings - for this idea the words are well ahead of the pictures. 
Sadly it seems there’s very little drawing for drawings’ sake. Lamps like this are in very short supply. 
There are some nice drawings for projects that failed, like this exhibition proposal for the Science Museum that crashed and burned. 
I’d like to report that the johnson banks studio is stuffed with designers also filling page after page with scribbles, but sketchbooks seem to be in pretty short supply. We had to dig quite a bit to find this, and we’re still not sure if it’s a drawing for a project or just an afternoon spent doing prawn people (or something). 
Luckily Julia did manage to find some tiny drawings that were to lead to something much more impressive. 
But overall, not a bad survey. Apart from a few real howlers, the ideas seem to get from head-to-pencil-to-paper pretty well, and after that it's down to our varying computer skills to decide whether an idea lives or dies. What this journey doesn’t show is all the ideas that happened at the computer and never got anywhere near a pencil (there are quite a few of those). And, as someone pointed out, there are many ideas that just get scribbled on the borders of the brief and are never to be recorded. Shame.
Perhaps I should end with a suitably ironic drawing - one of my earliest drawings for the main johnson banks website, back when we were toying with symbols, not words (but were clear that it should build from the centre). Even a website starts on paper, you see. 
Michael Johnson
Back to the top |
AddThis
|
