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31.03.08
This week’s classic student letter
We get some great approaches for jobs and placements - here’s a recent one that made us smile. (Original spelling retained). hi spent some TIME looking at your RECENT WORK while listening to THE BEATLES, I've looked at some PICTURES but I preferred the WORDS to understand how you ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS and get SOME PROBLEM SOLVED. I was tool lazy to DOWNLOAD STUFFS and doing SHOPPING, But I would like to CLIMB THE WORK TREE you made. You can read my THOUGHT for THE WEEK between the lines of my website or have a look at my graphic history explained IN A NUTSHELL through the attached pdf.
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26.03.08
Embarrassing early days at johnson banks
A few weeks ago Andy Whitlock, from the blog now in colour contacted us with a plan for various designers to post, on the same day, examples of their college work. Actually, to be fair he originally suggested school work but when I pointed out the distance between myself and those early band posters (about 200 miles to a Derbyshire attic), he relented. Nice idea. A couple of problems though - only recently The Bierut revealed his entire first portfolio on Design Observer which turned out to be, er, rather good. And in my case, half a decade later, I had started an obscure course in Marketing and Visual Art that didn’t really prepare me for the design world, or any kind of world really (unless you count an entire module dedicated to industrial buyer behaviour as useful). So my college folio is pretty much non-existent. And what is there is truly dreadful - that awful illustration above dates from my ‘Polish Illustration’ period. See what I mean? The only reasonable bits of work I can find come towards the end of college as I was looking for work and doing freelance on the side. This hilarious bit of eighties nonsense is a band identity that betrays my early love of Ladislav Sutnar and middle period Neville Brody. Mmm, jazzy.
Can you see the logos on the mike stands and funky hand-painted backdrop? OK, look, it was 1985. I apologise. It seemed exciting at the time. Mind you, the symbol could be used in several different crops, and came in different versions. Does that make it an early entry into the ‘flexible identity’ canon? Maybe not.
These are a bit better, an early upside downside logo for a man called Barry Olive and a burned out set of TV titles (I was in my Saul Bass stage) to pitch a show that never got showed. Why I decided that a man with a gift of a name like Barry Olive shouldn’t have some sort of olive logo is beyond me. 
I do remember spending a lot of time on this eye symbol, but it never got seen.
I found this as well, a typographic party invite that seems to revolve around endless experimentation with adjectives, or something (this time I seemed to be going through my Odermatt & Tissi phase). You always know something’s up when a designer’s best work is for party invites, birthday’s or leaving cards... All this stuff is long-windedly pre-computer and involved endless messing about with photocopiers, Letraset and a PMT machine. Ask someone grey if none of that made any sense. 
So, pretty disappointing really. I tell people that there’s no way I would have given myself a job when I left college, now perhaps they will see why. I was also asked to post a picture of myself then, and now. So on the left (and seemingly distressed, probably about my work) I’m about 19, and what I look like now. At least I cheered up. 
By Michael Johnson ........................................ Mindful of the fact that my work was pretty awful (and remembering that famous Miles Davis dictum - always employ people younger and better than you) I asked the designers to pick a couple of their college projects as well. Democracy and all that. Kath came up with this series of posters on a one-day project brief, to promote eating more fruit. The small text says: “eating five pieces of fruit per day can help protect you from cancer”
Julia chose a brief set by art website Eyestorm to create photographs using a white shirt. The photographs had to be inspired by an existing artwork from their website. These were inspired by Damien Hirst’s dots.
Kath and Julia were at college together and chose another couple of joint projects. Firstly an identity project for a space holiday company of the future called Breeze. The main photo shows the logo as a formation of five bubbles - the largest signifying the sun and the others the holiday destination planets.
Then stationery for a fabricated company ‘ball of wool’ (using their surnames Tudball and Woollams). As cats play with balls of wool, everything in the identity had an element of ‘cat’ - fur lined envelope, bell on the business card, well, you get the idea.
Miho chose her pencil typeface. It has four weights. The idea is that once you type something and you want to erase part of it, there would be an intermediate step where the erased face would appear to show the erasing
effect. She says that ‘Bruno Maag once said if I could get it to work, he would buy it’. So there. Her second piece is a 100 year calendar created for her dissertation to remind graphic designers to be socially responsible for the rest of their life.
Pali chose part of a campaign to raise awareness of how light pollution impairs the visibility of stars in the night sky, using photo-luminescent ink which absorbs light energy from the surroundings and re-emits it as an eco-friendly light source. 
His second piece is a ‘Seize the day’ calendar - created from self adhesive memo slips which can be torn off and used as visual prompts.
Thank you for your time. Up-to-date work to follow soon, we promise.
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24.03.08
johnson banks in Japan
This week johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson will be taking part in several events in Tokyo. He will be contributing to a D&AD Education seminar at the Advertising Museum Tokyo (ADMT) at lunchtime on the 26th March, speaking at the British Embassy that afternoon then taking part in the 50th ever Tokyo Pecha Kucha* at Super Deluxe Roppongi that evening. There’s more information about the Pecha Kucha here. 20 slides x 20 seconds each is testing enough in English, but trying to do it in Japanese? Tricky. On the 27th he will be taking part in a D&AD Forum in partnership with The Asahi Shimbun, at Yurakucho Asahi Square. The visit is timed to coincide with the exhibition of D&AD’s 2007 winners at the ADMT and is part of over 100 events which constitute the UK Japan 2008 initiative, for which johnson banks designed the identity. (More info here). 
Depending on the quality of your Japanese, there’s a recent piece about Johnson and johnson banks here. *Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat) was started in Tokyo a few years back by the Tokyo-based architecture team Klein Dytham. The idea has caught on worldwide and is currently chit-chatting in 109 countries.
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20.03.08
That’s a lot of waves
We’re in Japan on our annual visit next week, so we thought we’d theme this thought accordingly. Last year there was a lot of discussion about the US-based artists and their influence (or not) on the now infamous ‘bunnies’ ad for Sony. Paradoxically, one of Kozyndan’s more famous pieces is actually based on the famous Hokusai print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Original above, version below. 
Good use of bunnies, eh? It struck us at the time that it would be amusing to spend an hour one day looking at just how many ‘homages’ we could find to the original. So bunnies are one thing, but what about monkeys? 
Or birds? (As versions go this is pretty good) 
Give that the orginal dates from about 1830, it’s not surprising just how many versions can be found. (And of course it’s out of copyright). So, in no particular order... 
Got any more? Send them to info [at] johnsonbanks.co.uk
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18.03.08
A little bit of trendwatching
It’s fashionable to suggest that advertising is not going through its best patch. Anyone anywhere near a European TV set in the last year or two would have been met by a barrage of ads that all seemingly stem from just two places, namely Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Cog’ film and Fallon’s ‘Balls’.
And it has got confusing – Fallon’s recent ad for Orange (on the premise of ‘unlimited’) involves a never-ending rainbow made from coloured crayons, carpets, coloured streamers, balloons and rockets, all shot in the zeitgeist style of slightly washed out Californian colourscapes with impossibly thin yet plausibly cool characters doing plausibly cool, thin stuff. An approach that currently can be used to sell everything from mobiles to TV’s to cars to, well, pretty much anything.
Wieden’s new ‘problem playground’ work for Honda is good but feels somehow related to Fallon’s Skoda ads, whilst referencing back to Cog, and so on. A recent blitz of mobile phone ads all featured the same groups of twenty-somethings making friends/flattening cars/you name it which left it impossible to differentiate one ad from the next.
Campaign (the UK advertising mag) recently lifted the lid on this here in some detail so we won’t add too much fuel to the fire, but it’s interesting to observe Wieden’s own bloggers musing on the long-term success of Cog and the knock-on effect when they try something else – the issue being that all their Honda work is constantly referred back to it’s famous predecessor, whether they like it or not.
Of course design is hardly better – every decade designers become obsessed with particular approaches, typefaces, photographers, colours, you name it.
The illustrative style led by Paul Davis and David Shrigley has been a signature ‘tic’ of the noughties, as has the revival of rounded fonts, after a nineties dominated by one font, FF Meta. More recently designers seem obsessed with counterless, blocky type, with Non-Format at the vanguard. Then there is the sub-set currently deemed the ‘new ugly’, containing few real examples other than a couple of magazines featuring heavily scaled type and the odd symbol. 
In logo design, you can go here to see an entertaining round-up of (mostly American) trends - probably as useful as much to decide what to avoid as well as what to emulate. Logo designers seem to be currently obsessed with removing ‘stem’s and ‘spurs’ from letters such as d’s, a’s, r’s. Don’t believe us? Well, here are a few examples.
Soon the design community will move on to something new – our bets are on Alex Trochut. If the amount of times his website is bookmarked on del.icio.us is anything to go by, then this is the current and future squeeze of Mac-users worldwide. Just to give you a comparison, 365 people have bookmarked Wolff Olins’s website, 283 johnson banks but a staggering 1935 people have tagged his work for future reference, and that’s just on one bookmarking site. 
How each industry deals with these trends as they move from somewhere to everywhere is always fascinating. But advertising may have found its new direction already with Fallon’s extraordinary Gorilla ad for Cadbury’s, seemingly destined to clear-up in this years advertising gongage (along with its much discussed bunnies ad). Some reports have Cadbury’s sales up by 5%, so watch out for a whole new spate of surreal but cool ads coming soon to your TV, their main requirement being mainly to stand out and ‘be different’. 
Design trends used to be subject to a kind of trickle down effect - when record sleeve design was in its heyday, trends were set in that relatively ‘free’ environment and then found themself subsumed into corporate graphics a few years later. But more recently, the lines have become more blurred and the cycle of appropriation has seemingly sped up. Non Format and Trochut’s work will be regurgitated in this summer’s degree show work but by the time the appropriators get to apply their ideas for real the style will already be two years old. You could argue that as the UK’s two best agencies, it’s fair enough for Fallon and Wieden to draw inspiration from themselves. After all, if you’re copying something it may as well be yourself? But as ever the message for the rest of us is simple: either be the trend setter, or ignorer. Following will get you nowhere.
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11.03.08
How long does a logo last?
Well that sounds like a daft question doesn’t it – ‘Forever, stupid’ used to be the simple answer.
But it’s becoming blindingly obvious that as the world stops talking about ‘identity’ and replaces it with ‘branding’, we’re all equally adept at talking about ‘rebranding’ as well. It’s becoming a marketing tactic, to re-brand for short-term purposes, to re-position, to wipe the slate clean and start again.
A famous creative director once explained to me that ‘advertising is tactics, design is strategy’ and I thought at the time that he had a good point. I’ve repeated the quote several times when a client was trying to get me to do something for short term gain (i.e. tactics) rather than the long-haul (i.e. strategy). But now all bets are off – companies are just as likely to create a brand then change tack 5 years later and hang the cost implications. You get the feeling that branding is becoming more and more tactical. British TV stations Channel Five and BBC Three both started with one identity then switched within a few years (the latter changing only recently, prompting a bizarre rush of people pretending to like a bit of distorted type and some plasticine figures). 
In some respects this flies directly in the face of what many of us were taught. We admired all our modernist masters, we ooh’d and aaah’d at the typographic sleight of hand of logos in old Japanese symbol books, and deep down, hoped to add a classic to the canon. We watch the Fedex van fly past and deep down wished we could do something that good, that timeless, that irrefutable.
Trouble is, it’s tough to match up to the masters. Do something timeless, classic and kind-of-Swiss and it’s as likely to look as kind-of-time-locked as anything else – as Wolff Olins’s current creative director told me recently, ‘so much “timeless” design reminds me of Switzerland in the 60s or America in the 90s’.
It’s true that a design stands a better chance of lasting if you try, however hard it may be, to avoid the graphic tics of the time. Paul Rand’s UPS logo lasted 4 decades before they finally cut off those strings and hit the refresh button (they had, it’s true, stopped accepting parcels wrapped with string several years previously). Having lasted 40 years with such a simple graphic (and seemingly starved of anything exuberant) they opted for many current trends – let’s have a fin de siècle typeface, let’s make it lower case, and don’t forget those Photoshop light effects. If this lasts another 35 years it will be a miracle. 
But what logos could last for 40 years? North’s logo for the RAC (Royal Automobile Club) ruffled quite a few feathers on launch and is deliberately modernist, as is much of their work, but who can predict when or if force majeure will strike or a boardroom coup will remove it in the way that politics removed Time Warner’s eye/ear symbol. It’s an interesting game to play, pick symbols around you and predict which will be re-designed first.
Here’s a handful of logos off our own website. Now ask me which one will need updating first and frankly I have no idea – I would hope that our Shelter logo could last for decades, but whether it will or not is a different matter. I was worried that More Th>n would look too of its time but it seems to have settled into its design surroundings.
One of those logos (for Dimensions, an exhibition design company) is about 13 years old – it looked just ‘there’ when we did it, and just looks sort of ‘there’ now. Should we have done something a bit more ‘out there’ back in 1994? Perhaps not.
One of them has already been re-designed, as Yellow Pages have cut the umbilical chord that held them to Futura and opted for one of those ubiquitous humanist soft sans serif solutions. Paradoxically, by opting to hit the more modern button they’ve traded long term stability for short-term refresh, but if that notches up a few better points in tracking, that may be deemed a success. There’s also a wry typographic twist there, as the typeface named after the future (Futura) is dumped for something of the present. 
Some identities, even if they reek slightly of a particular time, have proven able to withstand the brand buffeting. British TV channel Channel 4 has remixed its 4 symbol countless times but it’s still true to the exploding bricks logo designed nearly 3 decades ago by Lambie-Nairn. MTV’s actual logo is frankly awful but they have managed to surround it with enough distractingly great stings to divert viewers’ attention. When Investors in Industry (a firm of British venture capitalists) decided to shorten their name to the much snappier 3i, they chose a design solution that reeked of eighties brushstroke vernacular, but it’s stood the test of time.
And then there are the script-based marks that frankly don’t stand up to any sort of logical analysis because they just ARE, and no-one dares mess with them. So Boots, GEC, Coca-Cola and Ford get gently tweaked every decade but no-one really dares take away all that heritage. (Although I have to say I always thought Paul Rand’s proposed Ford re-design was genius, shown below). 
So what are the options facing us? One is to design ‘classically’ and face the paradox that it may take decades to feel new, and may never. Another way is to use or tweak some dodgy old script logo. Another approach is to design something so fundamentally of its time, so quintessentially zeitgeist and be the first to market and a hex on all you copyists. This of course is a high risk strategy - what works for one sector may not work for another (think Tate and Abbey) and you can be left picking up the pieces. I always watch the Parcelforce vans go past and wince slightly – I know it was designed just as computer warped typography was in its infancy but it stills looks just a bit, well, wrong to me.
There may be a middle ground – design something intentionally simple which is allowed to flex and modulate, make new friends, hang out with a different crowd but still come ‘home’ when it wants to. I think we’ll see more and more of this, but it needs a lot of control, and a group of like-minded individuals prepared to push an idea but before returning to base.
The much-discussed 2012 logo may be looking to a brave new world but without interesting applications it will just end up as a hard-to-read squiggle on the end of the line of balls on the TV lottery page.
In fact, in terms of Olympic graphics, there’s an interesting parallel here. The logo for the LA Games was actually designed at the end of the 70s and ticks all those seventies modernist boxes – go-faster lines, clean, sharp, slightly op, etc etc. But essentially dull. 
What graphic designers remember is Sussman Prejza’s temporary graphics which encapsulated that whole Californian post-modern day-glo thing just perfectly, or Arnold Schwarzman’s famous cycling poster. For each, the logo just sits near the edge, either overshadowed by the noise around it, or acting as a subtle signature, depending on how you look at it. 
Perhaps because we rarely try to overtly design something absolutely up-to-the-minute, we tend to shy away from ideas which are completely in knowing they’ll soon be out. Maybe we should wise up to a digital universe where branding will be followed by re-branding as a matter of course. Expecting (and designing) identities to last less time could well be a good way to guarantee repeat business, after all.
But I won’t be able to stop myself, for a little longer, designing things that might last. Is that OK?
By Michael Johnson
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06.03.08
3 years of mobile phone photos
Natasha Faith’s time piece from earlier this week reminded Richard Holt of his own ongoing project, an ever growing collection of mobile phone pictures which appear in chronological order, the oldest getting progressively submerged by the new ones in a seemingly never-ending, ever loading web-page. You can view it here. This is what it looks like as it loads. 
As Richard says, ‘currently it spans three years - random people, typography, views, objects and observations with no other theme than I've paused for a moment to snap them with my phone. It's photographic archeology, so it's possible to dig down the layers, Time Team style to see snapshots from last Christmas, two Christmasses ago, holidays, seasons etc etc. It inadvertently charts the technology too as subsequent handsets have taken sharper images’. Use it to view three years of a designer’s life, test the speed of your broadband, whatever you like. In case you haven’t got time, here’s what the bottom of the page looks like. 
All time pieces can be emailed to info [at] johnsonbanks.co.uk.
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05.03.08
Sore heads and some gongage
There are some sore heads in the studio after last night’s Design Week awards, held at the Hilton on Park Lane. From four shortlisted items we luckily had one winner, our Beatles stamps... 
...and a commendation for our BFI scheme. 
Close, but with no apparent sign of cigars were our Airmail and Ropey Mail projects. 
The awards generally were spread out amongst UK design’s usual suspects (there’s a full list here), including best temporary exhibition for The Grand Tour and seven or eight thousand gongs for the iPhone. We had predicted some of this in our Review of 2007, come to think of it. Anyway, someone pass the paracetamol, please.
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04.03.08
Time flies, especially in Deptford
When we revamped and relaunched the johnson banks website at the turn of 2005/2006, we had high hopes for various sections, but didn’t really know how others would fare. We didn’t expect Thought for the Week to be so popular, for example. We had put quite a lot of time into another section open for anyone to send things in, entitled Time but it’s fair to say we haven’t been snowed under with regular submissions. But this arrived (albeit by a circuitous route*) the other week. Isabel Wilkinson has decided to reveal us that in one week she:
smoked 187 marlboro reds, drank 22 cups of tea, ate 4 slices of bacon, drank 9 bottles of water, spent 7 hours on a computer, listened to 'walcott' by vampire weekend 18 times, ate 4 hash browns, called someone a c*** twenty times, spent 119 hours awake, drank 3 half litre bottles of vodka, vomited once, spent 2 drunken nights in deptford, went on 4 bus journeys, watched 7 episodes of the o.c, ate 12 anchovies, ate 3 prawns, took 4 aspirins, did 5 pages in my sketchbook, got up at an average time of 12:28, complained of eye pain 4 times. The whole piece is shown below.
Blimey. Well, thanks for that Isabel, and thanks for taking the time. Apologies to sensitive readers for the liberal use of the ‘C’ word, it was Isabel not us, and let’s face it, Deptford’s pretty stressful. Hot-off-the-press, this has just arrived too, submitted by Natasha Faith. She decided to show us stills from a 1 minute film created using images found when searching ‘1 minute’ on Google. 
Here’s a close-up. 
* Incidentally, our ‘time’ and ‘thought’ email addresses are now submerged in oceans of spam, so the best way to get through to us now is probably to email info [at] johnsonbanks.co.uk. Apologies if you’re waiting for a reply to an enquiry or a time-piece, best to re-send to the info address.
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