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29.06.07
The Designer’s Prayer
Graduating student Selina Hull is concerned that design is taking over her/our lives like a religion and forces us to sell our soul. She has created this Designer’s Prayer in response.
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28.06.07
The 4 c’s
People often ask about our ethical stance. Probably as a result of a long string of projects in the cultural, government and charity sector, they assume we’re hard-coded to save the planet, the art, the children, whoever’s in need of salvation at this particular moment.
And it is true that we’re more interested in projects that open people’s hearts and minds to art, science, culture or charity. This is an area where our skills can have a genuine effect, not just line the pockets of our Lear-jetted friends in the city or American multinationals.
We’re passionately interested in what I call The 4c’s: countries, cities, charity and culture, and I would argue these are the last uncharted frontiers for identity design - the clients are open to ideas and are looking for something different. They’re not closed to change, risk-averse or blinded by brand strategy in the way that many corporations have become. I joke in our defence that ‘we’ll definitely go to heaven’ – someone recently quipped that ‘you’re not just going to heaven, you’re designing the pearly gates’.
My accountant would wish us to do more blue-chip work, and we do try. We’ve had some successes, like MORE TH>N, our work for Yellow Pages or Blackpool Pleasure Beach. But it’s also true that this year we’re doing Save the Children, last year we did Christian Aid, the year before, Shelter.
If you’d installed CCTV in the meeting rooms where we recently pitched to a loyalty management company then a major museum, I fear the energy levels were completely different. We did try, honest, but I suspect they could tell where our interests lay.
Of course, being ‘ethical’ has become phenomenally trendy but we’ve gently grown into our role, not written it in 36 point on our home page. We did more blue chip work in the 90s (and made more money) but for the last decade we’ve become more interested in the 4c’s. I’ll admit I’m sceptical of those who profess to be ‘ethical’ then accept with unseemly haste projects for Coca Cola or Nike – if you’re going to talk the talk then at least try to walk it too (albeit in less fashionable trainers).
But being trendy and ethical and balance the books is hard to maintain – inevitably the big bucks arrive searching for the next big thing, and from Brody to Carson to Tomato, edgy avant-garde graphics has sold its soul to the corporations and become swiftly blunted. The deciding factor is often money. Johnson banks has grown-up, and competes for large identity projects against vast companies seemingly far more resourced (but often less nimble). To stand a chance we need a decent office and a team of great designers, and that brings salaries, mortgages, and break-even targets.
It’s no coincidence that those designers doing entirely cultural work are two (wo)man bands working on kitchen tables – they can survive on projects with hundred-pound, not thousand-pound budgets. The rest of us either behave like latter-day robin hoods (stealing from rich clients to fund the poor) or have discovered that whilst this sector may never have proper budgets, they now have enough for us to ring back the same day (rather than the next week).
The paradox of ‘ethical’ design is lower fees, so the companies can’t employ many designers, or offer (highly unethical) unpaid placements. For students, they may be drawn to ethical design but will find far less opportunities. Every year an ex-student contacts me in a dilemma, juggling offers from a big branding agency offering security and salary versus a smaller agency where they’ll save the planet, make peanuts, but stick to the principles they held dear only a few months previously.
Another paradox is that much of the work feted by designers has historically been fashion or music related. But it’s virtually impossible to think of a charity project someone like Peter Saville has ever done – fashion graphics provides many their first inspiration but offers little or no ethical satisfaction. Our graphic heroes have historically been gauged on the quality of their work, not the green credentials of their clients. 
It’s tough to name more than just a handful of designers (James Victore in the US, Pierre Bernard in France) who have rejected the corporation for agitation. Maybe that’s changing and perhaps the new generation writing essays on ‘First things First’ will actually try to live up to their words (rather than mentally signing-up then going home to count their cash).
If a fascination with ‘ethical’ is all the rage, then I’m happier with that than the previous obsession, self-initiated projects. This seemed to begin with self-analysis, the constant referencing of obscure philosophical texts and/or Baudrillard and ended with hitherto unknown levels of self-absorption. One year, whilst acting as external examiner, four students showed me projects fuelled by their childhood memories. Fascinating to a degree, but you couldn’t help wondering if all that brainpower could have been better chanelled than merely embroidering sentences onto pillowcases.
But I digress. If the problem is not losing your soul, then the solution is very simple. Do good. Do good work. But stay in business. For many that’s a trickier mantra to maintain than it sounds.
This is an adaptation of a lecture given by Michael Johnson at this week’s D&AD student exhibition
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27.06.07
The V&A’s birthday
Last night the V&A celebrated its 150th birthday with a rather good party, and the unveiling of a special project where 150 designers, architects, photographers and artists each contributed a page to a commemorative book.
Some of the highlights are shown below - the full slideshow can be viewed here. 
Christian Lacroix 
Thomas Heatherwick 
Nick Knight 
Paul Smith 
Grayson Perry 
Ronaid Searle 
Rankin 
Michael Johnson
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25.06.07
All change, again
We’ve had a vast amount of feedback from last week’s piece about flexible identity, with many people expressing interest in the topic and suggesting other schemes worthy of discussion. For example, Martien from Holland rightly pointed out that the Netherlands Architecture Institute scheme (from 1993) was a trigger for many schemes over the last decade (it has hundreds of versions of the core mark).
Some have pointed out that it may have had some influence over this scheme for the Tate galleries in the UK. 
There’s been some discussion over Paul Rand’s work for IBM, which when edited down to key pieces does exhibit some of the flexibility we were hinting at, but is still rarely seen from blue-chips. Sadly the most-loved example (by graphic designers at least), shown below, only ever existed as an internal poster and was never seen by the general public. 
And more up-to-date examples would have to include the UK Big Brother identity, which has now been modulating every year for seven years. 
If you have a scheme that you feel should be covered in future thoughts on this topic, please let us know.
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20.06.07
All change
It’s official. The age of the static brand is coming to an end. Organisations, companies, institutions, even charities are realizing that having identity schemes that ‘flex’ and adapt to circumstances are more appropriate in the multi-channel, multi-lingual world that brands now inhabit.
Over-controlled brands are starting to look stiff and old-fashioned, but not all clients (and certainly not all design companies) have yet woken up to this latest shift.
It’s not as though we didn’t have any warning. As long ago as the 70s, this fantastic scheme for Boston’s WGBH TV was developed, where the channel’s numeral keeps modulating for different stings. 
The germ of this identity was developed in the USA when MTV launched with many adaptations of their channel bumpers and was developed again in the UK with the schemes for Channel 4 and BBC2. More recently TV Asahi in Japan has taken some of these ideas even further. 
For what seemed like centuries clients, even when shown these fantastic examples of precedent, would say ‘well it’s easier on TV’ and retreat into their monolithic logo bunkers. Truly flexible corporates remained unseen in the printed domain until the rise of the web showed that identities could bend and twinkle with low-calorie versions of their older, broader brand-width cousins.
Designers have been producing ever-changing fonts such as Beowolf which, thanks to some canny randomisation programming kept changing as you used it, but it wasn’t until worldwide brands like Google started to regularly mess with its own logo that the dam was breached and the gate well and truly opened. 
Slowly cultural institutions have caught the bug – the venerable V&A experimented with these posters in the nineties before committing more recently to a house-style that allows far more flexibility than before. 
London’s dusty old Natural History Museum now allows their designers to fill their new ‘N’ with pretty much whatever takes their fancy, and a couple of years ago the Walker Arts Centre in the US laid the groundwork for the new Southbank scheme with a truly innovative system that allowed the designer almost unlimited freedom, and a system of background checks, patterns and stripes. 
Old retail brands are joining in and making merry – Saks recently unveiled a 21st century rubiks cube remix of their 70s logo which allows for endless permutations of their logo, cut up into little squares then merrily shuffled around by their designers. Even Target has loosened up. 
As advertising agencies lose their grip on the communications channels, the logos are starting to come out of the corner. Once pushed as far over to the bottom right as possible, they’re becoming central to communication, no longer content to just be the the full-stop at the end of a piece of branded communication. The old ‘exclusion area’ rules are being regularly broken, logos are now part of headlines, even part of straplines.
Sony Ericsson were prepared to let their agency, BBH, go in order to keep this communications idea, which had been proposed by their designers.
After a slow start, Christian Aid’s agencies in the UK have finally realised that 17.5 million envelopes and a logo based upon it is a brand idea to be built on, not shoved into the gutter on the edge of an ad.
 Some logos now come in many forms, and many colours. Some, like the scheme for the BFI, come at whatever angle suits the designer’s layout the best. The straightjacket that was once ‘the brand manual’ is now more likely to be shorter, encouraging and have a lightness of touch rather than nine ring binders gathering dust on the shelf (the way they used to be). 
More rules are being gently unraveled, as brands like MORE TH>N allow what was once a treasonable offence, pulling the logo apart and incorporating it into headlines (made easier, admittedly, in MORE TH>N’s case, by the fact that the logo arrived as part of a typeface, making incorporation that much easier). Shelter’s nmenonic device isn’t locked up in a safe, it can be used in any word the designers like (as long as it contains an h, of course).
In some cases, such as the YWCA in the USA and Macmillan in the UK, the strapline has almost become the identity itself. For the AA, an old logo has neatly become part of a new strapline. 
Over time, even names are being dropped. 
Some are even experimenting with identities that never settle on a single form, like this Urban Outfitters blog-style website.
How static identity schemes will react remains to be seen. It’s true that whilst nearly all of the above ideas reflect well on the organizations that have adopted them, they almost all need constant monitoring and amendments. It’s become quite common to wait months, sometimes years, to issue a brand’s manual whilst all the possible permutations are worked out, sometimes in public.
But the benefits of developing fluid, flexible systems to encompass everything from fonts, to colours, to words, to images, to logos are enormous – with a bit of hard work and a good idea an organization stops being about just a logo and gains a complete visual and verbal language.
Can we see a return to locked, static brands? Well, yes, eventually – if flexibility becomes the new norm then of course inflexibility may become attractive again. And it’s interesting to see that the older, less nimble blue-chips are still slow to pick up on the idea of flexibility. Maybe they’re content to stay mono-message and hide behind a veneer of corporate consistency?
We’re willing to bet it won’t be long before one of them sees the light.
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19.06.07
Yep, you guessed it...
Mojca from Slovenia emailed us about the Austrian artist Christoph Feichtinger who makes prints of manhole covers all over the world: ‘He calls them Ferograms. He cleans the cover, spreads a black printing color on it and makes a print on Chinese Kitakata paper. He has been making these prints since 1994 in more than 30 countries around the globe’. 
It certainly makes a change from brass rubbings at the local church. Thanks for the link Mojca.
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18.06.07
Even more manholes
Well this is turning into a bit of an obsession - English designer based in Holland Martin Pyper contacted us over the weekend about the pictures he’s been taking of, yes, you guessed it, Tokyo manhole covers. Here’s a selection of some of his. 
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15.06.07
Integral On/Off Switch?
We’ve got a bit of a thing about useless jargon, but now it’s seeping into your local electronics shop. This cheap lamp was bought recently for a spare room - fair enough - but did it need to make such a big deal about, well, a switch?
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14.06.07
More manholes
Last year, to illustrate how fundamental design is in Japan we posted an example of a Tokyo manhole cover and admired its decorative beauty. That, we thought, was that. Little did we know that a parent of one of the johnson banks designers, in his spare time, also takes pictures of japanese manhole covers (as you do). Here are just a few from his collection. 
Fantastic. Imagine being in a ‘manhole design meeting’ at the local council and pulling out that squid design. Thanks to Michael Tudball for the use of his pictures.
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12.06.07
More children saved
Following on from the new work we revealed for Save the Children a couple of weeks ago, here’s a proper look at the set of posters we’ve developed for the brand launch. All the fonts were drawn by children, and all the borders and the images were constructed from the children’s drawings. These posters discuss Save the Children’s past achievements. 
These focus on their future ambitions. 
The project is also discussed in the current (June) edition of Creative Review.
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08.06.07
For the record...
It’s been a long week in the world of identity design, and probably the first time in earnest that the power of cyberspace has been unleashed on a piece of graphic design. Having written about Olympic branding several times, having sat through the pain of being on the ‘bid logo’ selection committee (and argued strongly against the awful ribbon logo) and having been quoted everywhere this week about the 2012 proposal, maybe it’s a time for reflection. Last year a 2012 director sat in our office and asked if we wanted to take an ‘advisory role’ to help pick the actual design proper. We declined, hoping (in vain) we might get a shot at the real thing. But I’m not writing this because I think we should have done it. I’m writing this because ever since I put my head above the parapet about the Olympics, I’ve only really seen one solution to this problem that I really liked, and I know that everyone’s going to ask me anyway. So I thought I’d share the proposal by Daniel Eatock (he of Big Brother logo fame) from 2003 . It’s my favourite solution to this brief. We might argue about the type but I just love the idea of the five rings. Michael Johnson This is the rationale 
This is the logo proposal 
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05.06.07
Rounded thoughts on page three
Our initial views on the much discussed new Olympic work are in today’s Guardian.
The piece in full is reproduced below. 
Designing the Olympics logo is tough. Most commentators agree it’s only been done well four times, and even that’s being generous. For twenty years we’ve been drowning in a sea of running men and brushstrokes.
Until yesterday there were basically two ways to do it - either spend years crafting a classic ‘system’ or do something late but gloriously ‘now’ and don’t give two hoots about it being ‘then’.
The best examples of the former would be Tokyo (1964) and Munich (1972). Tokyo’s brilliant scheme opened the world’s eyes to Japanese design, Munich’s took 5 years but still bears close scrutiny 35 years later. As a contrast Mexico and Los Angeles (1968 and 1984) were fast and frenetic but nicely timed – Mexico’s rings were tailor made for op art, LA’s fluorescence perfectly post-modern.
London’s identity tries a new route – pick a vigorous style, cross your fingers and hope like hell that it’ll still be relevant in the next decade.
It’s trying to be ‘vibrant’ and ‘youthful’. The website suggests you download bits for your children to colour in, neatly ticking that ‘child involvement’ box. When animated it has an edginess not normally associated with the Olympics.
To some it’s 30 year old California graphics. To others it’s reminiscent of early Dire Straits videos or old ads for Studio Line hair gel. It’s got an oddly ‘punk’ quality to it. Like punk, I’m pretty sure a lot of people are going to hate it.
I think it’s a spiky update of the ribbon idea it’s replaced and it animates fairly well. But, like the MTV logo it echoes, when the wiggling and the wobbling dies down you’re left with a logo that’s really, well, quite odd. And a logo we’ll have to live with for five years, one month and 22 days.
By Michael Johnson
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04.06.07
Worksheets are so now
Only a week after we unveiled our children’s worksheets for Save the Children, we’re glad that the idea has caught on with the new 2012 Olympics work. We’re sure that the blogosphere will be buzzing about this one so we’ll stand back and watch from afar. For a bit. (But we can't help wondering if the ‘Australia’ shape and the ‘TM’ for tasmania was planted on purpose?). 
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04.06.07
Cashing in on popular entertainment
Johnson banks got quite a drubbing from the philatelic community for our fruit and veg stamps a few years back. Luckily we seem to be getting a cautious thumbs up from the stamp community this time. Phew.
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