25.09.08
Masters of Design

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This week sees the publication of a useful new book by Rockport on identity design, by Sean Adams of LA-based design agency Adams Morioka. Albeit rather grandly titled ‘Masters of design, Logos and Identity’, Adams has succesfully selected about 30 designers from across the world, and devotes a series of spreads to each designer, showcasing recent work and analysing the way they work.

Some of the designers included with in-depth studies are Philipppe Apeloig, Margo Chase and Steff Geissbuhler, with useful shorter sections devoted to designers such as Michael Bierut and Vince Frost. There’s also a good logo round-up at the back.

Johnson banks’s creative director Michael Johnson is featured as one of the thirty, and we’ve reprinted below excerpts from an interview that formed the basis of the text.

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What is your overall philosophy about logos and identity?

Every time I think that I’ve fixed my view about how an identity should look, feel or communicate, a new project will come along and I’ll realize that having no fixed modus operandi makes life so much more interesting.

What do you think is more successful, wordmarks or symbols?

I think it was Bob Gill who said that ‘boring words need interesting graphics’, and vice versa. So, whilst, my default setting is probably drawn towards wordmarks, I know deep down that sometimes a symbol can be fantastically useful (usually when the words of an organization don’t quite communicate what they should).

I do think that as identities have to communicate so quickly, taking up valuable ‘real estate’ of an identity with a symbol has to be carefully considered – ie only a certain amount of space can be allocated to logos in line-ups or on websites, so taking up half the space with a symbol sometimes feels wrong.

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Should a logo be simple or complex, monochromatic or polychromatic, 3 dimensional or flat, moveable or static?

Personally, I’ve been fascinated for years in identities that can change, and adapt to their surroundings. I’m thoroughly bored of the ‘logo that goes in the corner’ syndrome and will do almost anything in my power to avoid this.

Based on your philosophy, what are the characteristics of identities that fail?

Well logos that immediately date a company are wrong, unless they’re happy to be immediately dated. As I’ve hinted, identities that are overly static and rigid strike me as inappropriate in the multi-media environment we now live in. The schemes that are overly policed by in-house logo-cops are such a drag to work on for other design consultants – before we became logo designers we had to earn our spurs applying other people’s schemes and that was quite a salutary experience. The trick is to make people want to get involved in a project, not just grin and bear it to pay the mortgage.

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Multiple technologies and media have changed the venues we use to talk with the audience. Has that affected the way you design identities?

The simple answer is yes – the advent of tele-visual needs, animation and the web has meant we’re constantly thinking about how an idea will work in a moving or animated form (our BFI work started as an animation, then became a logo). The more complex answer is that the changing technology has supplied the irrefutable reasons for flexibility that we’ve always desired – before, flexible, changeable identity schemes were just limited to TV companies. Now, everyone’s interested in schemes that can adapt to their surroundings and appear less monolithic than before. I’m much happier now than I was – before people just seemed to think I was nuts when I argued for logos that could change.

What are the top 5 rules for you on logo design?

I’m really, really tempted to say there are none. We don’t walk around the studio saying ‘ah yes, nice idea but what about the small-use black and white version’. We don’t say ‘the one colour version is paramount’. We don’t limit our work to vector programs. For a while there I think there was an implicit rule that our solutions should be reductionist, simple ideas (and many of them are, it’s true). Trouble is as soon as I say ‘that’s a rule’ I know we’ll go off and do something really complicated, almost to prove that the rule was a waste of time. Our Think London logo should have been a simple mark but ended up being made up of 44 separate symbols…

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What advice would you give to young designers about making successful logo and id systems?

To be honest, in England at least, very few students seem to be interested. This strikes me as a huge mistake. Their folios are crammed with ambient advertising, or viral on-line clips, or posters for film seasons, or personal projects. But they spend practically no time art college thinking about identity, designing them, practicing them… So they get to me and I virtually have to teach identity from the ground up. But whilst the brochures or websites or whatever all change, the one thing that remains constant is organisations’ need to identify themselves in unique and interesting ways. In other words, identity design isn’t going away. If anything, if our experience is anything to go by, it’s getting more and more important. So I’d study all of it, all of the time, then you’re in a position to practice it sooner or later.

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