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29.07.07
The johnson banks post office, 2007
This year’s johnson banks post office at the V&A fete featured specially produced airmail letters, our special twist on those self-sealing aerogramme letters you’d send to granny in Australia when you were a kid. We designed eight in total, which folded down from die-cut shapes into square letters.
The star of the show was probably the pig (the flying variety)... 
...with the bat, balloon and rocket as close runners-up. 
These are the rest of the set. Nice Pterodactyl. 
The letters come kiss-cut in A3 sheets. 
This is how the stand looked for the event, plus a few shots of the stall in action. 
We’ll be selling them on our shop pretty soon, but if you can’t wait, email shop@johnsonbanks.co.uk and we can sort something out for you. They come in a sturdy A3 envelope with a folding guide and special stickers. We haven't quite fixed the price yet, but a set of eight will be less than ten pounds, we hope.
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27.07.07
A little hint
We’re off to set up for this year’s village fete. It’s in the garden at the Victoria and Albert museum, costs £3 to get in (50p for kids) and is open tonight from 6.30pm to 10pm, and again tomorrow 28th July from 1pm until 5pm. We’re told that tickets are a bit restricted this year so best to get there early. Oh, and here’s a little hint at what we’ll be selling at this year’s johnson banks post office. See you there.
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26.07.07
Designed by accident
Trying to explain the design process to potential clients (who are usually not designers) often has to be boiled down to a series of fairly tedious looking steps. I avoided writing down our design process for years, perhaps naively clinging on to some sort of ‘black box’ theory of innovation – ie client’s problem (and money) in one side, client solution out the other side and a whole load of creative hubble-bubble in between.
More recently though, I’ve had to cave in to requests and have finally written a few ‘process’ slides that get stuck at the end of the presentation and are often hastily rushed through. Occasionally I’ll get a bit of feedback such as so and so showed a lot more process than you and suchlike and I’ll admit that through my forced smile my eyes are secretly lifted to the heavens because I know that the poor saps have been walked through interminable powerpoint slides in meticulous detail. Of course some are impressed by this, and that’s fair enough – if someone’s idea of a good presentation is 457 process slides then good luck to them. Whoever said ‘countries choose the presidents they deserve’ is a phrase that will transfer happily into the design process too (as in clients choose the designers they deserve).
Admitting that I find process slides a chore is one thing but recently I’ve also realised that a whole series of our projects have almost been designed by accident.
At that critical stage where only a finite series of days remain until the big presentation anything goes in the johnson banks studio, so critiques and commentary and indeed design by accident can happen at any point.
I’ll give you some examples. On the train back from the briefing meeting in the late nineties, I was certain that Parc de La Villette, who were searching for a way to glue all their communications work together, could benefit from a way that they could own the edge of a poster leaving the rest for the event. I’d thought that if the edge could apply to any side that would be useful. Some of those classic Vignelli ‘black bar’ schemes were playing through my mind.
But back in the studio every time I tried to make it work it looked a bit too Vignelli, a bit too static, a bit too perfect. 
So (in a bit of desperation) I gave my up-tight English layouts to the then (European) placement who promptly turned everything five degrees off-centre. All of a sudden she had placed the whole scheme into dynamic tension. A result, and almost by accident. 
When we were asked to design an identity for the inward investment agency, Think London, we were struggling a little to find a way to avoid all those ‘London’ clichés and in a slightly desperate move the skyline that we’d built (then rejected) got flipped upside down. 
As I sat there building a new skyline on the top, one of the designers passed and said ‘hey that’s neat, it looks like a reflection’. I looked back and she was right – I’m not sure if I was doing it consciously or not, but she’d made a really good point. 
More recently we laboured over a lovely commission to design Beatles stamps, and I’d asked one of the placements to help me realise one idea that had survived the sketchbook test, which was to photograph piles of albums on different, and suitably sixties, backgrounds. So linoleum for the early albums, then wooden boards, then shag-pile carpets by the end of the sixties. The placement duly set off photographing the albums we’d collected, we visited our local thrift shop to collect dodgy lamps and ashtrays as suitable styling touches, it was all set for some homespun digital photography and entry level photo-shopping. 
Then as the albums were being cut out on-screen, it dawned on me that the shag-pile was actually a terrible idea and the solution (to just use the albums) was literally staring us in the face. 
In fact the more I think about this, the more accidents there have been. Our fruit and veg stamps were once a lot more like fridge poetry until they turned into a discussion about a great japanese photography book on vegetable faces, then the idea then got simplified into the final solution.
Writing this (and realising how many happy accidents there have been) makes me think that the mistakes, albeit unintentional, must just be part of the way we work. ‘Mucking about’ with an idea seems to be more productive than I previously thought. Must go and amend that powerpoint now – stage 17.03 perhaps – ‘allowance for messing about and/or design accidents’.
I can’t wait to see those client faces when I show them that. Michael Johnson
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23.07.07
So, what will it be?
We're knee deep in product for this year’s V&A fete. For those of you who have never been, this has become one of the highlights of summer in London, when the V&A’s garden is taken over by designers for their very own surreal twist on a village fete. Singles night is this Friday night (the 27th), whilst Saturday is more of a family day. johnson banks has luckily been asked to provide a stall, and for the third year running we will be doggedly pursuing our ‘post office’ theme. But what will we be selling? Two years ago we were sending letters. 
Last year we were posting messages in bottles. 
Watch this space for more hints later in the week.
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15.07.07
The Honeymoon period
Once or twice a year a group of earnest twenty or thirty something designers sit in the johnson banks boardroom and grill me about setting up in business. It’s flattering to be asked, and I try to impart any useful things I can actually remember about the early days of setting up in business, some 14 or so years ago.
Several of the things I say come as a shock. The first is that, statistically speaking, at least one of their happy bunch will become seriously unhappy, is going to want out, and quickly. I urge them to arrange it so that parting is merely sorrowful rather than expensively litigious.
But what incurs the most spluttering into the Sauvignon is the news that they will do some truly dreadful work in their first few years. This always comes as an huge affront and they of course maintain that they will only ever do award-winning projects, they were the best in their class, they all got A stars in DT, etc etc etc. But it’s true. And what’s interesting is that doing terrible work won’t matter. For a bit.
I call this the Honeymoon period. It lasts on average about three or four years. From setting up to breaking through, companies and individuals have time and space to find their feet, their graphic voice, if you like. They have time to get things wrong because, by definition, not that many people are watching. No-one will hold it against them, no-one will post it on the pages of Design Observer or the like and say ‘now this is truly awful’ (well, not yet anyway).
Very few design companies start-up perfectly formed and producing perfect work, even those starting straight from post-grad perfection. One of the most admired ‘straight out of college’ companies, Graphic Thought Facility admit their first few years were less than memorable. When approached to design a sleeve for Spiritualized in the early 90s (the album ‘Fucked up inside’), they freely admit that the project spiralled into chaos and acquired a studio nickname of ‘Fucked up outside’. 
‘We had proposed a combination of process and subject matter that could have been used in a very fresh way but ended up very obvious and heavy handed’ explains Andy Stevens. ‘This was really to do with naivety in controlling the personalities and politics of the situation and we in effect lost creative control of the outcome – a crying shame but a good learning curve. We were that fed up with it that we didn’t bother to get more than one file copy’.
Of course they were only really a short step away from producing work like this for the Oki Nami restaurant (about three years after they started), which opened people’s eyes to the kind of work that they could do if left to their own devices. Stevens admits that this was the project that ‘gave our folder a great boost to secure similarly interesting jobs’.
It takes time to establish yourself in the eyes of peers, students and, most significantly, potential clients. Designers often naively assume everyone will clearly understand them, how they work, be up to date with their entire portfolio, know their star-signs and their favourite colours. But it’s not true. London, where I’m writing this, is awash with designers and design companies, all claiming to be the most creative or award-winning, often showing decidedly similar projects for decidedly similar clients. Cutting through takes a lot of doing and a sharp edge.
Hopefully, eventually, a project like Oki Nami puts a company on the map. It may be a piece of work that wins an award, gets publicised somewhere, is talked about, or is just plain different. It doesn’t really matter. Heads are nodded around town. Those who said ‘they’ll never make it’ have to carefully re-assess (often to something like ‘I taught them everything they ever knew’). A metaphorical bedpost has been notched.
As an example, NB Studio left Pentagram in 1997 after serving their collective apprenticeships and may have had some suspecting they were just ‘Pentagram-lite’ until the arrival of this series of posters for Knoll in the late nineties. They had busied themselves re-working US film posters for the UK market but Knoll defined them and helped move them away from their illustrious alma mater.
The honeymoon period also seemed to apply to johnson banks. Whilst I would have strongly denied it at the time, our first few years were filled with projects that promised much and failed to deliver, like this identity for Monotype that lasted only six months before new owners changed it. 
Or this identity idea for a the National Film School that only ever got used on one prospectus. 
Or endless and portentous broadsheet nonsense like these, selling paper (here exploring ‘thinking’ and ‘freedom’). Dutifully crafted, at the time. Dreadful, in retrospect. 
It took the obligatory three or four years before we produced a set of posters for McNaughton Paper and an identity for the William Morris show at the V&A that finally felt like a significant step forward.
When others are asked to reveal their mistakes during the honeymoon period, most designers are understandably reluctant to point out their howlers. Luckily a brave few have stepped up to the plate, such as Stefan Sagmeister. He nominates his H.P.Zinker Mountains of Madness CD cover as his breakthrough project.
‘When I first arrived in New York, I saw an old, quite distinguished man coming towards me on the sidewalk. Just as he passed me, he freaked and started to shout obscenities at nobody in particular. When the singer of the H.P.Zinker told me that the lyrics of the album deal with schizophrenia and the different ways the city can make you sick in the head, the old man came to mind again. My friend Tom Schierlitz took a calm and a frantic picture of an old man. Then we printed the calm image in green, and overprinted the frantic image in red. If you put this now into a red tinted plastic case, because of the fact that red and green are complimentary colors, the green image turns black and the red image becomes invisible’.
What Sagmeister had also done was deftly re-apply the principles of op art onto a CD case, which most album sleeve designers of the time were busy denouncing as a format from hell.
His nightmare project, a videogame package, is just as interesting. ‘The standard American packaging system for a video game at the time was a jewel-case inserted into a gigantic cereal box to cheerfully dupe little boys into thinking they might be buying something bigger and better. My first presentation to the client was somewhat below mediocre and it went downhill from there - with enough people, money and meetings involved we managed to quickly pass awful and moronic to end up with the remarkably pure piece of shit you see below’. 
Daniel Eatock’s response to my question was different. To those who saw his degree show in 1998 there were already signs of what was to come, and it was probably his work on the UK Big Brother a few years later that broke him through.
His memory of a project he wished he hadn’t done has two parts: initially this standard billboard for a TV programme about Ernest Shackleton ran as a normal poster in January 2002. 
But then the poster turned into a roadside installation involving 100 tons of ice placed neatly in front (presumably destined to flood the entire road, drains and pavement for days afterwards). Eactock admits ‘I hate it, find it wasteful, dumb and silly without any kind of intelligence. Can’t believe I was part of it.’
There may of course be companies out there who negotiate their first few years, stay in business, but don’t break through. You could argue that any company that produces nothing of note for more than half a decade seems doomed to mediocrity. Or maybe it just takes them longer to get their break? Maybe.
When the honeymoon is over and clients have a fix on a company and what it does, that brings new issues. Once any company’s ‘brand’ is defined, it takes an enormous amount of effort to change that to something else. (But that’s another topic entirely).
Most small design companies know they have to make it clear what they are, and what they do. The honeymoon period has to end, eventually. They just have to hope they come out of it still married to design.
Michael Johnson
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12.07.07
All change, again, again
Following a post about the rise of flexible identity and a postscript a few days later, we’ve continued to get suggestions from around the world of more examples. The founding editor of Eye magazine suggested another look at Studio Dumbar’s work for PTT from the late eighties, described by Dumbar at the time as ‘total anti-clarity because clarity can be very boring’. 
That reminded us to dig out this bizarre scheme from 1980 for Westeinde Hospital, also by Dumbar, that featured a ball that bounced its way around the hospital space. Still looks good, nearly thirty years later.
Much more up-to-date but still in Holland is Experimental Jetset’s interesting scheme from 2004 for the temporary site of the Stedelijk Museum, perhaps the first sign of those 45 degree stripes in the cultural arena. 
And a reader from Salzburg also suggested Sagmeister’s recent chameleon-like project for the Seed Media Group based on the phyllotaxis shape. 
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11.07.07
More advice for placements
An ex-placement has been in contact recently asking for our thoughts on the classic do’s and don’ts. Here are some of the things that came to mind.
Advice:
When sending letter/CV:
• Try to spell the creative director’s name correctly • Remember to put a stamp on (you’d be amazed how often...)
• Try to get the company name right: we recently got an email that said: “I really admire the work you do at Aboud Sodano...” • Try to avoid impersonal ‘to whom it may concern’ letters or round robin emails that contain 50 different design company names Interview:
• Don’t wear a suit to your placement interview • Don’t be late • Do have a bath before
• Do have a sense of humour • Do mug up on the work the company does
On Placement:
• Make tea even if you don’t drink it, it makes people like you much more • Seem interested even if you’re not really
• Ask questions (but don’t ask too many) • If you don’t know where the toilet is you should ask (one girl waited 3 days before asking)
• Try not to sigh loudly as if really bored all the time, that’s a real turn off. Sometimes graphic design can be dull, it’s true • Don’t be better dressed than the designers, they will hate you. (Once we had an intern who wore Prada shoes constantly and one of the senior designers couldn’t speak to him) • Don’t bring in an external hard drive and spend all your time copying the creative director’s CD collection • Work hard. If the company realises that you and your work are invaluable, you’re much more likely to get a job... • ...but don’t appear desperate, you don’t want people thinking you’re a basket case • Try to be personable. You’d be amazed how often people get hired because ‘they’re nice to have around’. You could try the ‘difficult but brilliant’ route but that’s a bit of a gamble
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07.07.07
Pun post
Recently we were contacted by a publisher looking for examples for a book about postcard design. Our initial reaction was that we’d done very few postcards, apart from our Send a Letter project. Then we remembered a set of ‘Pun Post’ that we’d developed at the same time as Send a Letter, in 2005.
Digging them out again prompted us to finally photograph them and give them a proper airing. Our only rule was to illustrate a whole bunch of really groan-inducing post-related puns. Originally we were just going to do a few. Then it got a little out of hand. 
For example we thought recycled postcards based on found scraps would make good junk mail. 
Bubble wrap seemed to make the most logical Airmail. Then we started to think about sets. 
These of course (plus the one at the top of this post) are Direct Mail. 
These? French letters. In French type, obviously. 
God seemed the most appropriate illustration for Address unknown.
Originally we liked the idea that some of the cards would be hand finished (the reality of doing hundreds of them ourselves sank in rather too late). 
So hundreds of copies of Drop me a line had to be individually stitched. 
Each Hot mail was hand burnt. 
Each Postal strike had a hand applied match.
Plastic insects were glued on for Fly post. 
Each Scratch card was personally gouged. 
Every Mail shot was drilled, one by one (physically shooting them took up too much time). 
Some, like this one, Goal post, were left blank (so you could write in your own objectives)... 
...or mark (for Post Mark). Some just used found vernacular graphics that we simply stuck on... 
..like these two examples of Mail Order. Some were just gratuitously designer, or obscure (or both).
Postscript 
Post it 
Registered post 
Free post 
E mail 
And Post box. One of our favourites was this, Internal mail, made from envelopes turned inside out then hand stamped accordingly. This one did seem to confuse people, it’s true. 
The set looked like this. There are more, but you probably get the idea. 
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03.07.07
Wood books
Probably the best thing we’ve seen in the student shows so far have been these wood books by Emily An. 
You approach them not really knowing what they are. Then you realise that each log is actually made of rolled newspapers, magazines or directories. As Emily explains, ‘Each log shaped book represents the amount of wood required to produce just one magazine, newspaper or yellow pages respectively’. 
A kind of 3d environmental bar chart, if you like.
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02.07.07
July at the BFI
This is a set of posters we’ve just finished for the July season of films at the BFI on London’s Southbank. 
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