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25.06.08
Debriefing on Interesting 2008
There’s been quite a bit of bloggage this week about last weekend’s Interesting 2008 conference. It’s originator, Russell Davies, has given a quick run-down of links and thoughts here. Wil Freeborn has published his drawings here. 
The boys at Thoughful came down from Manchester and have jotted down their thoughts here. And if you’re feeling brave you can watch the quicktime they took of the last 80% of Michael Johnson’s speech on Guitars and Graphics, lo-res here, high res here or read the less interactive version here). 
Above images by Tim_D from his flickr page. There are general flickr images of the day here.
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24.06.08
A typeface for UNICEF
Johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson has just contributed to an interesting project initiated by James West at Create/Reject, who asked 50 designers to name their current favourite typeface(s). 
Here are some other designer’s choices. 
The book only costs £3, and all the proceeds go to UNICEF’s Burma Cyclone Children’s Appeal. 
There’s more information, and purchase details here and here. It sold 200 copies on just its first day of release, so you may need to get a move on...
The full list of contributors was:
2x4, Adam Hayes, Alan Dye (NB: Studio), Alexandre Bettler, Angus Hyland (Pentagram), Antoine+Manuel, Ben Freeman, Ben Parker (MadeThought), Bibliothèque, Cartlidge Levene, Claire Warner (Browns), Domenic Lippa (Pentagram), Daniel Eatock, Daniel Lock (NB: Studio), eBoy, Eike König (HORT), Experimental Jetset, Farrow, Fernando Gutiérrez, Fuel, Hector Pottie (Third Eye Design), Henrik Kubel (A2/SW/HK), Hi-ReS!, Hyperkit, James Goggin (Practise), James Greenfield (BB/Saunders), Jeremy Leslie (John Brown), Jerome Rigaud (Electronest), Jessica Helfand (Winterhouse), Jon Dowling (SEA Design), Jon Forss (Non-Format), Julian Morey (abc-xyz), Lionel Hatch (The Chase), Matt Simpson (Stereo), Michael C. Place (Build), Michael Johnson (Johnson Banks), Mogollon, Nick Bell, Paula Scher (Pentagram), Paulus M. Dreibholz, Pixelgarten, Ralf Metzger (North), Simon Earith (YES), Spin, Stefan Sagmeister, The Designers Republic, Why Not Associates, Wim Crouwel, Zak Kyes, Zamir Antonio (Eat Sleep Work/Play).
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21.06.08
Guitars and graphics
This is an adaptation of a talk given today by Michael Johnson at the Interesting 2008 conference.
I’ll admit that this is a slightly selfish theme for a talk; during the day I’m a graphic designer but at lunchtimes and night I’m an amateur guitarist. And in a way the two things rarely come together. So I thought it would be interesting to take the last century of graphics and guitar music and see if, or when, the two things ever do combine.
The earliest blues guitarists used small, parlour sized acoustic guitars, and often tried to play in a way that emulated the popular piano style of the time, ragtime. Gradually blues guitar developed as a style in its own right, and the earliest guitar heroes were born such as Robert Johnson. Legend has it that he popped out for a few beers but ended up selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads and received the ‘gift’ of the blues in return. 
At the turn of the century decorative design was a long way from beer and crossroads, having carried over the decorative styles of the Art and Crafts and the Viennese Secession. Illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley and artists such as the Beggarstaff Brothers were the design poster-boys of the day (although no-one called them graphic designers, not yet).
After WW1 graphic design as we now know it began to develop, spurred on by the experiments of El Lissitsky and Malevitch, and institutionalised by Gropius’s Bauhaus. Most of the inspiration for the rest of the century’s design stems from this work, either by the Bauhaus’s own disciples, or by the parallel skills of people such as Piet Zwart.
What they were listening to as they pushed around their wood type is much harder to ascertain (although it seems that there is a link between Gropius and Mahler, the former having once had an affair with the latter’s estranged wife). Wagner of course was one of Hitler’s musical favourites (he loved to use it at rallies) and became the spur for some of the finest, earliest ‘agit’ work by John Heartfield, protesting against the Nazi dictator’s rule. 
Things were much simpler back in guitar-ville; Count Basie acquired a new guitarist in 1937, called Freddie Green, but Green became famous for only ever wanting to play rhythm, never lead. Django Reinhart excelled in Europe but it was Charlie Christian who was the first guitarist to make a mark with an electrified guitar. 
But post-war the saxophone was king, thanks to the likes of Charlie Parker. Parker’s phenomenal technique was daunting to most other musicians, especially guitarists, struggling with strings the width of industrial wire and unsophisticated instruments. Legend has it that Parker would often scribble down the ‘head’ for a track in the cab on the way to the studio, leaving the other musicians struggling to play the fusillade of notes that had appeared in his actual head.
Of course the graphics of the fifties has become iconic, either Blue Note album sleeves, or the development of mainstream graphics by Paul Rand and Saul Bass.
But still very little of this crossed over into guitar music: this was design for jazz music, or corporate America.
 It took the pioneering electric blues guitarists of the fifties to show everyone what was possible on an electric guitar, from Howling Wolf, to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. 
Of course when white guitarists tried to copy this sound, it came out sounding especially jangly and bizarre – I defy anyone to listen to Duane Eddy or the Shadows now for any period of time without laughing hysterically (although Hank Marvin can at least claim to play the first Stratocaster imported into this country).
Finally though, the sixties began to bring guitars and graphics together. Not only did The Beatles and The Stones steal well from their fifties heroes, but they commissioned great sleeves too. 
And rather than do poor, weaker covers of their blues heroes, guitarists such as Eric Clapton transformed tracks like Freddie Kings’s Hideaway. By making liberal use of a distorting amp (with his sound engineers holding their hands over the ears at the ensuing racket) Clapton introduced a new sound to the world’s guitar players.
But my two subjects were finally about to collide properly, courtesy of the psychedelic movement and two important events in London – an exhibition of Aubrey Beardsley at the V&A in 1966 and the arrival in town of a certain Jimi Hendrix. All of a sudden music and graphics were inseparable. 
Wes Wilson, Hapshash & The Coloured Coat, Milton Glaser’s iconic Dylan poster: these were all iconic designs and designers of the time whose worked became umbilically linked to the music. The arrival of the next wave of bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd saw a phase when the art displayed on the 12 inch sleeve was to become as critical as the music to a teenager’s memories of the period, and propelled sleeve designers such as Hipgnosis to stardom. 
But there’s only so many Roger Dean covers that the world can actually take, and it’s no surprise that Queen became so easy to lampoon in Wayne’s World. Rock music, with its twenty minute guitar and drum solos had become both ridiculous and ridiculed. Cue a musical and graphic revolution: Punk arrived using the work of designers such as situationist Jamie Reid to create a visual style to match the aural barrage. The Buzzcocks sleeves of Malcolm Garrett influenced another, new wave of designers, just as their 60s counterparts had done a decade earlier. 
But just as graphics was getting into it’s stride, with famous work from Peter Saville, Neville Brody (and later in the eighties, Mark Farrow and Vaughan Oliver) music mainly rejected the guitar. 
Much of eighties music is dominated by Duran Duran, the Human League, synthesisers and pop videos – the only guitar music to be heard came from a genre heavily influenced by the virtuoso Eddie Van Halen - poodle-haired rock was born. 
70s guitars shops had long banned the Zeppelin anthem, Stairway to Heaven, but soon added the Guns and Roses anthem, Sweet Child of Mine, to their list. If, by the end of the eighties, G’n’R were the world’s biggest rock band, that gives you an quick insight into how far the music had fallen.
Just as the decade before, and the decade before that, another musical and visual revolution came, right on cue, with grunge music and its graphics neatly intertwined.
In the UK, the 90s were dominated by guitar based music influenced by The La’s and propelled by a sales war between Oasis and Blur. The century ended with a series of newer bands turning to the designers of their favourite Zeppelin and Floyd covers, Hipgnosis, to do the same for them. And newer, rougher bands like the White Stripes carefully controlled their image, colour schemes and videos whilst reviving great, grungy, messy blues-fuelled rock. 
The last few years have seen an interesting twist to this story. Whilst Dragonforce would previously have been known only to fans of speed-thrash-metal, now they’re famous for supplying the most difficult track to play on the latest version of Guitar Hero. If you’re stuggling to play it for real (like me), there are legions of teenage bedroomers happy to show you their version on YouTube. Or 9-year olds prepared to show you how to do it on the game itself. 
Guitar Hero seems to have propelled a revival in all interest ‘Rock’ in general – AC/DC are back in the studio and this summer sees Whitesnake, Def Leppard and Kiss all playing the festivals in Europe. Soon you’ll be able to buy the Aerosmith version of the game itself, so if you’re struggling to master ‘Walk this Way’ don’t fret, you can just play the game version instead.
This revival, for once, isn’t being mirrored by graphics – music graphics has progressively shrunk from the size of the 12 inch album, to the CD, to a 50 pixel square picture on an iPod screen. Graphic designers are peddling their wares everywhere else, but not in music.
But if the pattern of the relationship of guitars and graphics reveals anything…
...it’s that the two don’t stay apart for long. In the sixties, seventies and nineties the two were umbilically linked together. So that means we’re due for the next big-thing, pretty soon.
Are you ready? PS this talk was delivered whilst playing the guitar, and involved some complex choreography with a rather complicated pedal board. This ended up being pretty amateurish, in case you were wondering, but luckily Interesting’s attendees didn’t boo me off (like they can in Guitar Hero). If you’re feeling brave you can watch quicktime of the last 80% of this speech, lo-res here, high res here.
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17.06.08
Two views of Saint Martins
Two johnson banks designers, Kath Tudball and Julia Woollams, were special judges at this year’s Central Saint Martins show - these are their notes from the day’s judging. We visited the Central Saint Martins BA graphic design degree show this weekend to judge best in show - the first year of an annual prize set up in memory of former student Joss Turley, who would have graduated this summer. The prize was awarded last night at the private view.
The show is currently on at the Bargehouse (the exhibition space at the Oxo Tower), which is a great venue, and it made a very nice change from the previous few years of traipsing up hundreds of stairs to reach the show hidden away at the college’s Farringdon site.
After walking round the three floors of very diverse work (the CSM course covers graphic design, illustration and advertising), we both agreed that Clara Brizard stood out as best in show. We thought she had great ideas and a very well presented show.
Our favourites from her show were her German type laser-cut posters and her random-generating graphics program. The posters entitled ‘Beyond my Window’ (and designed to display on a window) illustrate the history of German type through basic German phrases. Here’s a few of them,
and a detail of one.
Her graphics program, called ‘If this is graphic design’ questions the style over content issue. You can type in any word and generate your own instant, random ‘designs’. Here’s a couple of our ‘potato’ posters we ‘created’ on Sunday.
We also wanted to commend a few other students.
Diego Ulrich, who won the runner’s up prize, made a beautifully complex typographic installation on the history of the printed word.
The joint show of Live Bergitte Molvaer and Johanna Bonnevier looked very professional as well as having some intriguing pieces: Live showed a project updating Razzle Dazzle camouflage (originally a camouflage paint scheme used mainly on ships in the First World War) and Johanna investigated RGB colour as a 3d type project. They then combined their ideas from both projects to make another 3D typographic piece and a pair of chairs, which play with perspective like the Razzle Dazzle camouflage.
We also thought the illustration student Craig Boagey’s highly detailed pencil portraits of people with ASBOs were disturbingly lovely.
Other highlights include: Madoka Takuma’s eco-friendly alphabet packaging;
Jeeyun Michaella Chung’s notebooks, with ruled lines slanting in the correct direction for left-handed, right-handed, 
and both-handed people;
Olga Frolova’s clothes-label map t-shirt illustrating the world distribution of garment production;
 Niky Röhreke’s global warming illustrations;
and the advertising duo, Sophie Isherwood and Sophie Reeves’ project for missing kids showing toys demonstrating in Trafalgar Square. 
The show is open until Thursday 19 June, 11am-6pm, at The Bargehouse, Bargehouse Street, London, SE1 9PH. Apologies for any name misspellings or dodgy credits, email info [at] johnsonbanks.co.uk and we will amend asap.
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16.06.08
What music looks like
It’s been a musical weekend. Johnson banks has just finished the new symbol for next year’s Unplugged expo, which will be held at Excel in London as part of the London International Music Show ’09. The Unplugged show features hundreds of exhibitors of primarily acoustic instruments, and sheet music. This is how the new symbol (based on a continuous stave of music) will be used. 
We were at London International Musical Show ’08 this weekend to see how our logo for the whole event worked out. The show brings together some already established shows, the London Guitar Show and Drummer Live, and adds one hall dedicated to sound recording technology and another to acoustic instruments. The logo itself was designed quite a while ago (we snuck it in just as we were enforcing a studio ban on silhouettes) and uses a world projection made of different instruments. 
Here’s the symbol with type... 
...and how the organisers used it on lanyards and passes. 
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11.06.08
Dead obvious?
Our inbox has been stuffed with people pointing out that this recently spotted gravestone in Highgate cemetery... 
...actually marks the resting place of artist Patrick Caulfield. As the Telegraph reported in 2006, ‘as a large gathering of mourners assembled at the graveside, on one of the cemetery’s broader avenues, a jazz trio played some of the painter’s favourite tunes. Fine weather contributed to the bittersweet mood, bathing the scene in bright but already fading autumnal sunlight – an end-of-the-day light, which filtered through the trees in a way that might have pleased even Caulfield, who did not care much for the great outdoors. He was a man of few words, as he demonstrated in his monosyllabic choice of epitaph: ‘Dead’. The word will be carved into his headstone, in lettering of his own design’. Here’s a reminder of one of his classics - ‘After Lunch’, from 1975. 
Thanks to Rob from Manchester for the first tip-off. He admitted he discovered this whilst researching Unusual Headstones or Grave Markers on this flickr set. 
Exactly why he was researching ‘unusual headstones or grave markers’ he won’t reveal, but we suspect he’s doing some posters for a death metal band, or something.
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08.06.08
Some Kingston highlights
I’m just coming to the end of my third year as external examiner at Kingston University’s graphics course. It’s a course which most people would place as one of the top ones in the country - a mixture of conceptual, 2d and 3d thinking that is always intriguing. Here are just a few of the highlights.
Christopher Syrett’s unusual project, shown above and below, examines the credibility of two newspapers by measuring their ‘column inches’, making a pretty unusual installation in the process. 
One of the consistent performers of this year’s crop is William Southward - here are a couple of his projects. Firstly a bizarre project to counter panic attacks/crime in the community that suggests that grown-ups would wear their own, full-sized ‘comforters’. 
Here they are in action. 
Several of William’s projects stood out: for me this everyday punctuation idea was really great.
I really liked the conceit suggested by Luke Hopkins and Hannah Graham of a NEW retail outlet that actually sold old stuff, neatly presented in recycled and not-quite-fitting packaging materials. 
Sarah Cupitt’s hidden depths poster looks innocuous at first, then on closer inspection.... 
...reveals its creatures to be plastic, to protest against the increasing amount of litter in our oceans. 
It wouldn’t be a student show if there wasn’t some gratuitous alphabetting, and Dave Wood’s bulldog clip typeface doesn’t disappoint. 
This is part of Joanne Clarke’s project on Breast Cancer - a simple mailer encouraging women to use the supplied die-cut card to good effect. 
Part of my role at Kingston is to look at the first and second year work too. I liked Owen Evans’ 2nd year project on ‘professional equipment’ - here’s a great crematorium image. 
Oddly one of my favourite projects of the week actually came from a 1st year. When asked to celebrate her hometown Jess Reynolds decided to make her own customised wellies from her favourite walks. 
Not bad for a first year, I thought. The show itself is only on briefly in Kingston but the greatest hits will be on show at D&AD’s New Blood student exhibition later in the month. By Michael Johnson. (ps this was an entirely personal pick of items that took my eye, and would look good on a web page, apologies to those I missed)
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06.06.08
A mysterious gravestone
Walking through Highgate cemetery last weekend we discovered this, apparently unmarked, gravestone. It wasn’t what we were expecting to see. We wondered if anyone knew who it was? If you do, please email info(at)johnsonbanks(dot)co.uk
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01.06.08
Sendai Astronomical Observatory
We’ve spent the last two years working on our largest project yet in Japan, a space observatory a short bullet train ride out of Tokyo in the city of Sendai. Our identity for the observatory is based around the notion of ‘bringing the cosmos down to earth’, by combining space images with everyday things to illustrate and explain aspects of the cosmos and astronomy. We then combine these images with an arrow shaped device formed from the Japanese for ‘Sendai City Astronomical Observatory’ (ä»™å?°å¸‚天文å?°) and it’s English-language translation. Here are a few examples of the image pairings: this compares a double star cluster to the way eggs can merge in a frying pan. 
This image compares the rings around Uranus and with a cup and saucer (and the image at the top of this post compares a little girl’s hula-hoop with Saturn and its rings). 
The logo itself comes in nine different angles. 
This is how the logo interacts with examples - firstly to illustrate orbiting runners around a track, secondly likening the swirling of the Milky Way to the motion of a washing machine. 
This example compares the behaviour of a black hole to a plug-hole. 
Here the crust and core of a planet is likened to an ice-cream. 
There are fifteen image pairings in total, the intention being that the observatory can pick and choose from this palette to explain concepts within the building, or use them on everything from bags and banners to vehicles. 
On a recent visit to the site, we recorded some of the applications of the new identity so far. 
From the outside the observatory looks like this. 
We suspect the idea for this came from the initial research we did into astronomy - the most useful books for us were children’s introductions to space. We seemed to be drawn towards a solution that explained space first and foremost to children and families (one of the key audiences for the new building). Presenting this project in Japan has also forced us to learn a particularly specialised vocabulary - for example, the Japanese for hula-hoop is fura fu-pu. A double star cluster is a nijyuseidan. If we were feeling especially brave we would sum up the scheme as ‘Uchuu o chijou ni motte kita’ (宇宙 ã‚’ 地上 ã?« æŒ?ã?£ ã?¦ æ?¥ã?Ÿ) which roughly translates as ‘cosmos brought down to earth’.
Johnson banks was appointed in 2006 by Japanese exhibition design group Total Media Development Institute, which created the observatory’s interpretation and exhibition space. The building was designed by architect NTT-F Co, a division of the Japanese technology giant NTT Group. The Observatory will open to the public in early July.
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