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29.05.08
Type notes from the motorway
There’s usually little joy to be had driving up and down Britain’s motorways. But this bank holiday, whilst stuck in interminable contraflow, I found myself examining road hauliers’ logotypes. Desperate, really, but I couldn’t help myself.
Even though Eddie Stobart has recently re-branded, he still wrote the book on doing it best; a huge great name writ as large as possible (and note the new snappy tagline - trans, store, logistics - they must have got some brand consultants in). I have a feeling many would still prefer their old, between-the-wars, hand painted drop shadow effect, but essentially it’s still one huge moving ad for Eddie’s wares. 
Many of course follow suit and with the advent of European operators there are some extraordinary sights – here’s the Bulgarian operator, Discordia, for example.
Imagine trying to justify that decision in the boardroom – ‘yah, we’re using Discordia for this work, because we were really in tune with what they were saying’. Extraordinary really. I hope they’re cheap, for their sake.
But after the initial fun of spotting massive pieces of type has worn off, you’ll be amazed to see how many organisations have logos you would never have expected. You’d expect the budget clothes retailer Primark to have a logo like this really, wouldn’t you? 
Well, actually, no. Here’s their actual logo, trying quite hard to be sort of upmarket, paradoxically. Even Discordia’s extraordinary logo is written in an old engraving-style typeface. There’s obviously some weird reverse logic at work on Britain’s motorways.
After about three hours of this you’re initially left wondering if there are any typographers left in the world, but slowly it dawns on you that for some things, the typeface doesn’t really seem to matter much, at all. There’s a famous David Ogilvy example I (vaguely) remember where he describes two women walking past a billboard and one says to the other ‘I would have bought that soap if they hadn’t set the headline in Times Roman’ (apologies if my memory has warped the example, but you get my drift).
A cruel example, but sometimes true – typographers prevaricate for weeks and months over the choice of a typeface but let’s be honest, most of the general public struggle to differentiate just between typefaces with and without serifs until you cite examples that they might know, like good old Times and Arial. Even then it’s a struggle. Try going any further than that at a dinner party and you’ll be left with blank stares and the rest of the table giving the people either side of you pitying ‘you got sat next to the designer?’ looks.
Before you throw your hands up in horror, there are quite a few examples where the type just doesn’t seem to matter much. Look, here are several different ways of writing the Orange logo. Now, which one is correct?
OK I did the last one in ‘Modern’ just to make you feel better but it’s not so easy deciding between the others, is it?
We’ll noodle about with the best of them over the precise choice of a typeface, and luckily most of our clients trust us to find a typographic language that suits them. It’s just that a few hours on a motorway reminds you that most of that thought may just be passing people by. It’s a sobering thought. By Michael Johnson. The ‘proper’ Orange logo is the second one, we think, but there are plenty in circulation that look pretty close to the first one as well
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23.05.08
As in ‘guns of...’
A few months ago we were contacted by a start-up film production company who wanted a new identity. We asked them what name they were going to use. ‘Navarone’ they replied, a reference to the famous war film where the heroes scaled a seemingly insurmountable cliff, against all odds, etc etc. So a good analogy for a new ‘we can get it done’ film business. The new identity is based upon an ‘N’ monogram, that appears in many different sizes, and can adapt to its circumstances. There are 24 variants of the logo. 
Here’s how it applies to stationery. 
Here’s the tallest, thinnest version. 
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21.05.08
The Aesthetic Lottery
Last week’s furore over whether certain bits of wood and metal did or didn’t go to the right place has by now become an annual event. Within days of each other, schemes that won gold in New York’s pre-eminent scheme (the ADC) have barely registered in London (at D&AD), and this will doubtless continue with no discernable pattern until awards season reaches its end.
Some projects that many of us would have marked down as our ‘projects of the year’ have yet to win a thing, such as Pentagram’s Sak’s packaging. Stefan Sagmeister’s extraordinary 15 part book won gold in New York but only just scraped into the selection in London. 
Our Beatles stamps went one worse, winning big in America but not even making the annual in London. Ouch. ‘In the book’ anonymity nearly beckoned for the Partners’ Grand Tour project, but they had the foresight to enter it into an advertising category too (assuming, correctly, that the design judges would mark it down) and it rightfully won D&AD’s highest prize.
To outsiders this seems odd, but actually all it should do is remind those in the design industry that ours is a notoriously fickle business and we should give up trying to objectify the process - predicting end results is, essentially, a waste of time. As Harry Pearce (of Pentagram) memorably described it recently, the whole thing is an ‘aesthetic lottery’ anyway.
But designers, being sensitive souls, can become scarred by the whole process. Their memories of the ‘ones that got away’ can make for entertaining reading though (once enough time has passed). Quentin Newark tells a great story about this nice logo for Trees for Cities that Atelier Works designed several years back. 
‘I thought it was a work of genius. I blew it up huge. And that’s Alan Fletcher's thumb print. At least a Silver. I was a judge that year, and as I strolled down the aisle, I saw not one but three other logos using thumb prints. The D&AD girls has helpfully hung them in row, side by side. A glut of thumbs. It looked like an infant school wall. We had gone years, if not decades without thumb print logos – I can’t remember one since Aziz Cami’s wonderful Green Thumbs gardening company – and the very year I launch mine I am but one of four. When the judges came to that section, I cringed when I heard one of them say: ‘oh its finger print alley’. None of them got in’.
Many years ago johnson banks designed an extremely unusual ‘brochure’ for the V&A to raise funds for its proposed extension (designed by Daniel Libeskind) that took the form of a paper sculpture of the building constructed from one continuous spiral of white card.
We couldn’t fathom why it hadn’t featured in one particular award scheme, and some muttering started in the studio. Then one of us came to judge another scheme soon afterwards and discovered that with enough jiggling about the model simply fell apart. Ooops. So when faced with a miserable pile of deconstructed cardboard stuck on some polyboard you couldn’t really blame a set of judges for marking it down.
Sometimes savage judging can sometimes leave entrants baffled: Carter Wong probably still don’t understand how this marvellous project for Howies DIDN’T win – in case you don’t remember, the discarded wardrobes were selected by the designers and then hand painted for Howies stores by a selection of illustrators. 
Extraordinary. Nominated, yes. Pencil? No.
How, exactly, a set of recycled hand-painted wardrobes for a green clothing retailer didn’t win is beyond most of us, even now. We’re not sure that Phil Wong is really over it though:
‘There isn’t a credible alternative to D&AD - although on the occasion when the wardrobes were overlooked, I could have lined up the jury and gouged their eyes out with a blunt pencil’ he recently admitted.
This beautiful set of packaging by North for London eatery Yauatcha was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Sean Perkins – when it wasn’t accepted he saw it as final proof that he was wasting his time with D&AD and hasn’t entered since. 
This type of high-concept, ‘packaging as art’ approach has sometimes failed to be appreciated by more commercial designers. If judged by a set of designers intent on searching for ‘shelf stand-out’ and ‘clever use of back-of-pack’ then it would have confused (and scared) them completely – ‘where’s the logo – where’s the appetite appeal?’, and all that. Shame on them.
Luckily of course clients couldn’t give two hoots about all of this – North can show their Yauatcha work to foodie clients and they will eat them up – Carter Wong can include their wardrobes in retail presentations and they’ll gather appreciative noises every time they’re projected onto a boardroom wall.
So the trick seems to be to not take it remotely seriously, and the next time someone tells you that one particular scheme or another is the only objective record of the best work of the year remind them that yes, lotteries offer the biggest prizes, but winning them is still entirely down to chance.
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16.05.08
Picking up the pencil shavings
There are a couple of interesting pieces on the Creative Review blog that reference to last night’s D&AD Awards, memorable mainly for an unprecedented 6 gold awards across the board, but no awards at all in Graphic Design. There’s a critique by CR’s editor Patrick Burgoyne here, and the transcript of a long discussion between Sean Perkins of North and johnson banks’ Michael Johnson here. Our congratulations to The Partners for winning gold for their Grand Tour project.
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14.05.08
You say Tomarto…
The world of design is not a world of absolutes. You can write as many strategy slides as you like and build mood boards for months but eventually a design has to be shown to a client and they have to be persuaded of it’s a) magnificence b) suitability (hopefully both, sometimes one, sometimes the other).
Clients of course can feel a bit out of sorts at this moment – generally not trained in design, but often interested in the subject, they can sometimes offer up bizarre reactions to what they’ve just been shown. Most designers can dine out on their ‘great ideas the client didn’t understand’ stories, and we can blame clients all we like for the ones that got away, but designers themselves often can’t agree what constitutes good design. You can surround the creative process with plenty of bluff and bluster but no-one can say with absolute certainty when the ‘right’ solution has been reached.
The advertising community can somehow decide between themselves what is a great ad and what isn’t, albeit with a running public gallery of press and TV to help them assess and reassess as a year goes on. By the end of any given year, the advertising bible, Campaign, has pretty much reached a consensus of what was the ‘best ad of the year’. But, aside from its communal love of anything Apple-branded, nothing at all seems to hold the aesthetic judgement of designers together.
It was probably much simpler, once. Thirty or forty years ago it was a simple choice - between being a grid-systems ‘Swiss school’ graphic designer (armed with copies of Graphis magazine dedicated to Müller-Brockmann, Aicher and Max Bill), or a ‘New York School’ graphic designer who loved Chermayeff, Brownjohn and Geismar, admired those recent ads for the VW Beetle and liked the eclecticism of Pushpin. A simple, straightforward choice.
Here we are, 4 decades later, and things are a lot more complicated. In London alone you still have Müller-Brockmann devotees, but more for the ‘look’ of the Swiss style than anything else, a sort of Aesthetic Neo-Modernism rather than its more philosophical original form. Then you have another group of Closet Modernists who fall back on it in times of stress (or deadlines), dabble in ideas and might ‘play away’ from Univers and Helvetica every now and again (but only in an ironic way, you understand). There’s a whole group who wouldn’t know an ism from a schism but know a good grid when they see it – let’s call them the Gridnik Modernistas.
Then you have a whole school of thought once cruelly dubbed ‘Wit and Whimsy’ by one of Tomato’s founders - founded on 70’s and 80’s craft and ideas-based design. This in itself has spawned a whole sub-strain of disciples trained and dedicated to designing things that could have been created in the heady days of 1973 - let’s call them the Witty Young Fogeys. Talking of Tomato, there’s a strain that maintained that the way they worked and their destructive tendencies was everything, a sort of Process Deconstructivism, if you like. There’s a interesting strand of this that takes British whimsy, a dash of process, everyday junk and a bit of modernism, who we could call the Whimsical Process Vernacularites.
Then there are the designers who refuse to sit in any camp and resolutely flip-flop out of one dogma into another, the Pluralistas (often arguing brilliantly for whichever base camp they might be set up in at any one time as they prepare their ascent). Anyone who spends any time on the interweb will have noticed a recent avalanche of geometric, blocky designs in Nu-Rave colours, let’s call them the Counterless Geometricals. Then there’s a small group saying that bad is the new good (and the only way to truly stand-out), arguing that work should be more hand-made and appear as wrong as possible to be right, the Ugly Duckling Difference Devotionists.
Now obviously we’re overstating some of this to make a point, but not much. If it’s that easy to sub-divide graphic design into 10 different groups, imagine what happens when you ask them to agree about any given design. Most other disciplines could never accept this: mathematicians can spend whole careers looking for the perfect ‘proof’ of a theory – irrefutable evidence of something’s existence. Marketeers use profit, loss, sales and stats to show how something is absolutely right, or absolutely wrong.
The only thing that you can say with any certainty if you ask 10 different designers for their view on a piece of work is that absolutely nothing will be agreed.
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12.05.08
Advertising/Art?
For an industry blessed with several geniuses, the biggest budgets and the largest egos, the art of advertising hangs infrequently on gallery walls. But its power is undeniable – just as designers can name particular record sleeves that pulled them into their profession, art directors cite old Benson and Hedges layouts that did the same. These are images etched deep into our collective cultural consciousness, whether we like what they stand for or not. Presumably this is what the ‘Advertising Art’ exhibition at the Chambers Gallery is trying to redress, and on paper ticks all the requisite boxes. Traditional photography stalwarts like John Claridge and Barry Lategan mix with more recent art directors like Paul Belford and Dave Dye; living legends like Sir John Hegarty are also involved, as are ads by his agency BBH (Nick Georghiou image below). 
To my semi-tutored eye, the work of Nadav Kander and Irving Penn (image at the top of this page) will always remain peerless. But whilst I appreciate the still life photography skills on show, how they will appear neatly framed on white gallery walls? These are seminal images that hung in the most public of galleries; huge poster sites across the country, or on the back covers of our favourite magazines (like these Boddingtons ads). 
How they will look re-contextualised as ‘art’ remains to be seen – this Avedon portrait of Iman (for Alexon) was a breakthrough at the time but borders on the tasteless now, even though its art director, the late Paul Arden, on seeing the image proclaimed “this is art!” 
This may be an exhibition best viewed as cultural history rather than the ‘art’ that was originally intended.
This is an adaptation of a piece for Design Week by Michael Johnson. The exhibition is at The Chambers Gallery 14th May – 14th June 2008, 23 Long Lane, London EC1
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07.05.08
An insider’s guide to Tokyo
It’s fair to say that Tokyo’s not a city for the faint hearted. It’s not really on the tourist trail, so if there are open-top buses (and I’ve never seen one), there’s not much to tour. Just getting about, successfully, on buses and trains is a feat in itself when there are 30 million other people doing the same thing, and if you don’t have a good map of where you want to go when you hail a cab, then good luck and good night. So why bother? Well, you’re going to Tokyo to get something done, not hang about. You’re going to a world capital unlike any other, a magnet for designers, architects, musicians and artists throughout the world. The city where those freaky David Mitchell novels finally make sense, the city that (when it’s dark and rainy) feels like a Ridley Scott movie on a permanent loop. A city where you’ll be as inspired by wandering its streets and shops or by looking at its manhole covers. It’s one of the few cities in the world where getting lost (and it happens all the time, even to locals) is a pleasure, except of course when you try to retrace your steps to where you got lost, if you see what I mean…
Anyway, my favourite places in Tokyo are (in no particular order)… 
The Aoyama ABC book store in Roppongi
I’m fatally attracted to design bookshops the world over, and can give you quite precise directions to my favourites in Amsterdam, Sydney, Toronto, wherever. My absolute ‘must go’ in Tokyo has to be this particular one in Roppongi, stumbled on by chance when I lived nearby in the late eighties. The Aoyama/ABC bookshop was an ocean of calm for me then and is still there 20 years later. I always go back, I always find something I’ve never seen.
2F Roppongi Denki Building, 6-1-20 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032 
Tenya tempura restaurants
Remember those 8 dollars for an apple stories you would hear about eating in Tokyo? Well, it’s nonsense. OK, if you want to buy tropical fruit in the lobby of a huge hotel it’ll be pricey, but stray slightly off the beaten track and be prepared to enter a tempura shop full of slurping salary-men and you’ll be rewarded with a bowl of vegetable tempura for about three quid. Marvellous. I’ve taught myself to read the blue and yellow ‘Tenya’ sign in Japanese, which took a while but it was worth it.
Several locations including:
Harajuku TK Bldg 1F, 4-31 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku,
Tokyo Isomura Bldg. 1F, 5-1-4 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo 
Tokyo’s equivalent to Denmark Street
A bit like books, I’ll gravitate to the guitar sections of any city too. Tokyo doesn’t disappoint – get off at Ochanomizu station, walk down the hill and each side of the street is lined with great shops absolutely crammed with stuff. The shop assistants even tune the guitars for you before playing. Fantastic.
The area from JR Ochanomizu Station down to the Surugadaishita intersection. 
Tokyu Hands
Someone once called Tokyu Hands the Japanese Woolworths. If only Woolies were like this – a treasure trove of hardware, homeware, junkware, you-name-it-ware. You can even buy offcuts of raw materials so you can go back to your flat and do a bit of craft corner. If you’re lucky you’ll find these marvellous re-arrangable Kanji letters (shown above) as well. I found the Shinjuku one by getting lost (see above, above) which was a great surprise, but I always struggle to find it again.
5-24-2 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku 
Standing in the middle of Shinjuku station
I remember reading once that the definition of alienation was for a foreigner to stand in the middle of Shinjuku (one of the world’s busiest) at rush hour whilst the whole of Tokyo thundered past. I disagree, I think it’s a great idea, and now that people don’t stop, stare or point at you like they did 20 years ago, it’s almost fun.
Ito-ya
You might expect the leading Japanese stationery store to be quite something and Ito-ya doesn’t disappoint - floor after floor of paper, envelopes, pens, origami, stencils… Even Letraset is alive and well here. Guaranteed goodies for all graphic designers. The Ginza shop is quite astounding.
2-7-15 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 
Miraikan
I found Miraikan on my last-but-one visit, it’s a museum of ‘emerging science and innovation’ and it’s crammed with great interactive cutting-edge stuff. Visit on the right day and you’ll catch one of the robots on demo, or just play with the room sized model of the internet (armed only with ball bearings). If you love London’s Science Museum and Paris’s Cité des Sciences (at La Villette) this is a must - you’ll lap this up.
2-41, Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, 135-0064 Japan 
Spiral Market, Aoyama and Axis in Roppongi
OK, these are a bit clichéd (a bit like going to London and visiting Heal’s) but the reason why they’ve been around for decades is that they both house great shops, galleries and exhibitions.
Spiral Market, 5-6-23 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo
Axis, 5-17-1, Roppongi Minato-Ku, Tokyo 105
Wandering around Omotesando and Harajuku
Again a bit of a cliché but you’ll pick up as much about what is or isn’t happening in Tokyo by playing spot the architect as you wander around the rich streets of Omotesando then strolling through to Harajuku - traditionally the hangout of Tokyo’s tuned in and often extraordinarily dressed teenagers.
Harajuki station, Yamanote line. 
The Creation Gallery + GGG Gallery
Does any other city in the world boast two galleries for graphic design? I don’t think so. We’ve got used to London’s Design Museum having maybe one graphic design exhibition a year, and the V&A having something about design and advertising about once every five years. So good, but not great. The Creation Gallery and the GGG gallery are both dedicated to graphic arts, and are both within walking distance of each other in Ginza. Need any more proof that this is designer heaven? The Creation Gallery, Recruit GINZA 8 Bldg. 1F, 8-4-17 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
GGG Gallery DNP Ginza Bldg.,7-7-2 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061 This is an adaptation of an article written by Michael Johnson for D&AD’s Ampersand magazine.
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04.05.08
The Mouse goes metal
Earlier in the year we helped to rename and relaunch Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Awards, now called the Mouse Awards. Judging has just finished and the winners are about to receive their trophies, which we’ve been carefully designing, computer cutting with a CNC machine from aluminium blocks, then anodising, polishing and engraving. As you do.
Our main task was to find a way to give the Mouse awards a distinctive physical shape that linked back to the logo, and to provide an award people might be proud to keep in their desk, rather than relegate immediately to a dusty shelf. Thanks to our 3d helpers, toolers and engravers for making this idea come to life. 
This is the logo for the scheme, as designed earlier in the year. 
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01.05.08
Gold in New York
At last night’s Art Director’s Club of New York awards, there were only two Gold awards handed out to British design companies - one to The Partners for their great National Gallery project (as predicted), the other to johnson banks for our Beatles stamps. 
The ADC New York was set up in 1920 to “dignify the field of business art in the eyes of artists” and communicate the message that “artistic excellence is vitally necessary to successful advertising”. So there.
88 years later their design awards are held in pretty high regard as well, and are pretty hard to win (as you might expect from a scheme that's been around for nearly a century). You’ll find full results here.
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