06.02.08
The Avalanche

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Apologies for the lack of thoughts, but a server crash has hampered us for a week or so. And we’re still recovering from what we’ve started to call ‘the avalanche’, when a wall of shelves full to the brim with archive work and all manner of design company detritus decide to throw itself off the wall in a desperate bid to be looked at once more. Messy. Really messy.

Obviously this was a bit of a blow for the wood type collection, once carefully sorted and collected into trays, now residing in plastic buckets. But in some respects a useful excuse to throw away yet more of those brochures we’d collected for no apparent reason.

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The further we dug into the debris the more interesting stuff we found. These strange looking folders, for example – these were our main mechanism for presenting work, pre-computer, before affordable, portable projectors. And inside, a whole series of old sleeves crammed with old work, mostly of a derisory standard.

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But sprinkled amongst the dross were some really interesting old, forgotten ideas that we thought we’d share.

How about this, a logo designed for London football club Queens Park Rangers (QPR) in the early nineties that never saw the light of day. It still looks alright to us – maybe we should email it over to QPR’s new and rather cosmopolitan directors. (QPR has recently been taken over by Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mittal. They probably have a few bob to spare).

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In case you’re wondering, the ‘R’s’ logo currently looks like this. Now, we know football clubs love their history, but really...

qpr_now

We found strange things like these unused concepts for the British Council, from the late nineties – we were trying to persuade them that everything in their network of 900 classrooms worldwide should be labelled, in English, to act as teaching prompts. So the teachers’ shirts would be named, table tops and chairs inlaid with typographic veneers, cutlery engraved… well, you get the idea.

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We also found some British Council thoughts that never made the cut – we did eventually do dozens of teaching posters on the intricacies of the English language, but oddly these ideas to explain ‘phrasal verbs’ never made the cut. Shame.

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We think this was a scribble for the UK sector of the dome – remember that? Pretty ropey really.

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This is really old and dates back to the 80s – part of a photoshoot illustrating what a student might do with £30 (the bribe then offered by NatWest Bank to new recruits clutching grant cheques). Somehow we’d decided that £30 could be spent sending 23 valentines (cards and postage was obviously cheaper then). And there was a reason why the metal heart couldn't be pierced but we’ve forgotten what it was.

23_valentines

This is an interesting memory – part of a whole body of work suggested (but unused) by an organisation lobbying for Britain’s role IN Europe (not out), hence the typographic trickery.

britain_in

We’d completely forgotten about this - an annual report for Colombia. The country. We were so worried about whether we should do it or not, we phoned the Foreign Office who said ‘it’s fine’. Less than a year after it was printed the President was accused of corruption. Great. Still, it’s not every day you do a layout with Garcia Marquez in it.

colombia_report

The cause of the avalanche of work? Our builder, who had decided that there was no real need to attach the top shelf to the wall, they would just sort of hang there by themselves. A theory that proved a little flawed.

It was nice to discover some old-and-forgottens. But now it’s time to find a new builder (and sort out that wood type). Oh, and maybe find a more reliable server too.

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