27.04.07
Art Fund posters

When we started The Art Fund’s identity re-design last year, one of the aims was to design specific posters that would run only in the museums and galleries which had ‘ArtFunded’ items. So, if you went to the V&A and admired Christopher Dresser’s teapot, on the way out you would see that The Art Fund helped to buy it.

You might call it a very site specific advertising campaign. It’s taken a while to get going, but now we have enough examples to illustrate what we mean. These are designed for the Tate, the V&A, National Gallery, the Museum of London and The Fitzwilliam. More in the series will follow later in the year.

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25.04.07
We still prefer ours

Kate Moss’s new logo has just been released, designed by Paul Barnes and Peter Saville.

Kate Moss

We’re not sure about it, to be honest. Luckily, the one we designed last year is still available, if anyone’s having second thoughts.

Kate Moss

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23.04.07
Things to make you go hmmm... #2

We really hadn’t intended this to be a regular thing. Honestly.

But we were tipped off last week that the Ashley Bolser Agency had developed an idea for their website sharing a, shall we say similar, approach to our 2002 Phaidon book Problem Solved.

Not at all subtle. But, as ever, it's entirely possible that this website was developed in 2001 as Ashley developed his love for interrobangs and a pink/purple palette. Entirely possible.

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19.04.07
It’s that time of the year again

D&AD has announced its nominations and the world’s advertising and design studios are picking over the lists of nominations, with the added twist of a series of running commentaries in the blogosphere.

Broadly speaking these commentators are either neutral, critical or on the attack. The attacks on D&AD often come from the disenfranchised whose favourite projects have been rejected, and can now go on-line to mutter their disapproval. (For the record, we’re ‘in but not up’, as they say, and are a little disappointed that unusual schemes for Christian Aid and The Art Fund were passed over by the identity jury. Mind you, the same jury decided that Macmillan’s new scheme wasn’t book-worthy either, which strikes us as an extraordinary decision, so they were obviously having a low-blood sugar day).

Minor gripes aside, another running theme has re-surfaced this year, which is to do with a perceived imbalance of nominations towards the advertising industry. I thought I’d look a little harder at the figures to see if I could shed any light on this.

Let’s start with hard stats. About 25,000 ‘things’ were entered from around the world. 715 projects made it through to the book. There are a total of 151 nominations (the amount of which are determined on a jury-by-jury basis). There will be about 50-odd yellow pencils. Black pencils are much rarer.

I oversaw the 3 graphics juries, which received about 1200 entries in total. The 3 juries short-listed 70-80 items from that for the book (that’s actually quite generous), and nominated 11 of them for yellow pencils. It’s true that one jury took the unusual step of including 4 pieces of advertising in their nominations (OK that’s weird), but even then, not a terrible year for graphic design. (If you want terrible consider the ‘art direction’ section – they only managed 2 measly nominations from over 500 entries). The graphics section of the ‘book’ will look healthy, and will represent a good historical record of last year’s graphic output (which to me is really the point of the whole exercise).

If we lump together the nominations for the general ‘graphic’ categories (ie graphics, branding, packaging, editorial, books etc) and take out those odd Artois posters there are 16 nominations, of a total of 151. So traditional design represents about 10% of the total. If we combine the advertising categories (TV, press, posters, direct etc) there are about 68 nominations, so about 45%.

Now you could look at that and screech ‘4 TIMES AS MANY NOMINATIONS’ and you’d be right. But when you look at the actual amount of physical entries, there are actually SIX times as many advertising related projects entered versus design, which means that design, proportionately, isn’t doing that badly.

I’ve also, purposely, left out some significant categories. The digital categories go from strength to strength, with 23% of this years nominations going here (ie viral, websites, gaming, installations, TV graphics). They probably call themselves ‘designers’, I would imagine.

The product and environmental categories scoop up another 10%. They probably call themselves designers too.

So if we treat ‘design’ as a pretty broad church that can incorporate anything from a logo, to an exhibition to a website, to a product design (and its packaging) then we end up just about even, with design at about 43% of nominations and advertising at 45% (the remainder is shared out amongst the crafts juries such as photography and illustration).

Of course, some of the above is a bit arbitrary – the rise of ‘virals’ could quite easily be apportioned to ad agencies embracing YouTube, and that would skew the results again. The jury on that particular day were obviously on some happy juice – from 350 entries, 16 have been nominated. (So on paper it’s currently 12 times likelier that you could be nominated at D&AD if you do virals than if you art direct press ads and posters). Bear in mind this was an extraordinary result that sometimes comes about in the early days of a new category. Also, it’s fair to say that the ad industry is obsessed with it as a new medium, given that it remains uncharted, un-policed territory.

D&AD will often throw up these kind of bizarre results. One of the graphic design juries this year decided to nominate mainly work from Germany and Austria, for reasons known only to themselves. (As one of the jurors muttered on the day, sotto voce, ‘if that was written in English they wouldn’t find it half as interesting’). Everyone has stories of ‘the one’s that got away’, often with some justification. I always remind myself that my favourite project by Alan Fletcher only just limped into the book (his ‘art’ posters for IBM) without even a sniff of a nomination.

Watching the juries ebb and flow this year (I was only cajoling, not voting) was interesting – many of them initially complained about the work, then surprised themselves by finding little gems. Sometimes there’s no doubt that the juries self-destruct, or if faced with a smaller entry they conclude (wrongly) that low numbers = bad work. But sometimes the work isn’t up to much either.

On balance, it’s not as bad as some fear. I’m personally a little bit worried about how hard it’s become for British graphic design firms to get even a nomination (if you consider that of the 11 graphics nominations, only 3 were awarded to home grown talent). But D&AD made its international bed, and now it must live with it.

Even though, when you look hard at the stats, the design/advertising imbalance isn't as bad as it first seems, there's no doubt that D&AD still has to go some to persuade many younger designers that it isn’t just a an ad-man’s love-in.

But what doesn’t change is that winning pencils is still remarkably difficult, which will make people desire them even more (and inevitably, grumble even more). Bear in mind that we’re just discussing the nominations here – things could be completely different when we get to actual awards. Historically the advertising community throws them around like confetti, whilst design sulks in the corner. Will that happen this year, I wonder? We’ll find out in May.

By Michael Johnson

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16.04.07
Things to make you go hmmmm...

Nearly a decade ago we produced a symbol for UK government building projects using a photographic sapling that threw a full-grown oak tree as its shadow.

Not earth-shattering, but for late-nineties central government a signal that design needn’t always be dreadful. It appeared on panels all over the UK, alongside the words ‘building for the future’.

We didn’t really think of it again until last weekend, when walking through Paris, we discovered this homage (scroll down this page to see). With the slightly post-modern addition of an orange crane, here was ‘building for the future’ reborn, along with with words that translate clumsily as ‘To renovate, to embellish, to last. To build our future’.

Perhaps the crane/tree was done ten years ago and we had actually ‘borrowed’ it from someone in Paris.

Yes, perhaps.

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12.04.07
Look up, numbers 5,6&7

Continuing our series of lost signage, here are three more found in Stoke Newington.

Contributed by our signage specialist, Josie Evans.

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10.04.07
Inspired of Swiss Cottage

Driving north at the weekend, I finally stopped and took a decent picture of the sign for Grodzinski’s bakery in Swiss Cottage. It’s a strange thing to admit but it’s one of my favourite pieces of type, ever. True.

It reminds me of a logo that Tibor Kalman once did for the film Matewan where he and the co-designer Tim Horn tried to make it look ‘undesigned in its weight, proportions and letter spacing’. They wanted it to ‘look like it was drawn in 1911 by someone without skill or knowledge but with an enormous desire to do it well’. Grodzinski’s somehow manages to do all of this, effortlessly.

We tried to emulate it once in our logo for Rupert Sanderson (who sells very pricey women’s shoes). Not sure if we really did it justice though. It’s much, much harder to do type ‘badly but well’ than it looks.

Michael Johnson

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06.04.07
Now you see it...

In a recent meeting, as we presented our work for insurance company MORE TH>N, we realised that it had only just dawned on the potential client that we had placed a ‘more than’ symbol into the word. Now, it’s fair to say that the more than/greater than keystroke isn’t a particularly famous mathematical symbol and probably now has more relevance in html code but it is basic algebra, after all.

It made us wonder how many times the general public must simply skip over the things that we graphic designers prevaricate over. We really had intended people to see the ‘>’ as a more than sign, and thought it might prove to be a useful mnemonic device. In research most saw it, and could still read the logo (although what else those two words could possibly spell remained unexplained by the idiot researchers). Mind you, some people see the ‘h’ in our Shelter logo as a roof and a chimney – we don’t, we just see a roof. Sorry.

Designers have been planting these typographic tricks into logos for some time – one of the all-time classics must be the example of Q8, developed for Kuwait Petroleum (as in Ku-eight – get it?). A remarkable piece of salesmanship on the part of the designers really given that Q8 predominantly operate in Europe where the phonetic joke doesn’t quite fly. (Q8 is pronounced kuuy-acht in Dutch, for example).

Probably the cleverest typographic twist of the last decade has to be the Fedex logo, with its hidden device. Many people simply don’t see it. But present it to a group of students, point it out and there’s an audible ‘ahhh’ as half the room suddenly see the arrow that its designer Lindon Leader (then at Landor) so judiciously placed between the ‘e’ and ‘x’ of the logo. Perhaps worried about the then ubiquity of arrows in ‘communications’ graphics, they preferred to keep it a ‘hidden bonus’. As Leader himself has said of his creation, ‘punchlines that need to be explained are neither funny nor memorable’.

Needless to say, the man who didn’t see the ‘>’ didn’t give us the job. Neither funny, memorable nor hired.

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04.04.07
Tokyo Type Directors 2007

Our Send a Letter project is being exhibited as part of the Tokyo Type Directors 2007. It’s at the GGG gallery in Ginza until the end of April.

The Tokyo Type Directors is a world-class scheme and usually features the most interesting type-based work from around the world, and of course Japan.

The exhibition poster below is by John Warwicker.