29.07.08
Mad as hell about moodboards

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We recently discussed a project with a marketing consultancy where the terms of the deal were that we would take their brand ‘positioning’ and turn it into a viable corporate identity for a major UK charity. Nothing at all odd about that, we collaborate in that way all the time.

But certain aspects of the conversation worried me. For starters they used the expression ‘brand essence’, a phrase I’ve always found more akin to perfume counters or those drops of vanilla you carefully ration out when icing cup-cakes, but I put that one down to semantics.

In terms of the ‘brand essence’ itself, they unveiled what struck me as a fairly normal ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more’ approach (what I’ve started to call the Network positioning, as in Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, four Oscars and suchlike). Obviously it’s not that much of a surprise for a charity to be worked up about something, but fair enough to reflect that in their vanilla drops, as it were.

What started to trouble me was their insistence that our first task, as collaborators, would be to ‘explore’ this ‘essence’ with ‘visual stimulus’ for research. It was then that it dawned on me – they wanted some moodboards. Oh no.

Perhaps it’s because I once spent a couple of years at a consultancy better known for their packaging than anything else where several of the designers seemed to spend vast proportions of their days attacking Tony Stone catalogues with scissors. But now, for various, rather irrational reasons, I’ve developed an almost pathological dislike for them.

In case you’re reading this and wondering what I’m blathering on about, a ‘mood’ board is meant to ‘capture’ a word or an idea in a series of pictures which are then arranged in a semi-artistic way onto a big piece of board. Classic mood board words are ‘transparency’ and ‘trust’ in the corporate arena and ‘luxury’ or ‘elegance’ in packaging. For some designers, they still fall back on a trusty pile of magazines and those obligatory scissors, but with the advent of Google images, on-line stock and (‘how fantastic!’) websites like ‘moodboard’ (true) your ‘polyboard can just spring into life’™.

(Ok, I made the line up, but it didn’t seem that unlikely, did it?)

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I’m sure that some people must find them useful. For certain non-visual types of client, it’s probably reassuring to be shown a series of boards, asked to pick a handful that ‘feel’ right (or even wield the scissors themselves) and leave the meeting feeling that everything’s ‘really on track’.

And maybe they were useful, once – we developed a set of visual prompt cards once for a client about a decade ago that contained suites of colours and quotes to help their internal teams think about their design briefs and they seemed, for a brief amount of time, to be vaguely useful.

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Trouble was, I only really found one of the cards of any use, this great quote by AA Milne, spoken by that great brand strategist, Pooh Bear.

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A decade later, some companies seem to have built their entire businesses around workshopping this kind of stuff to death with their clients (and of course charging them accordingly). One London company has even decided to give it a special name (Visual Planning™). A few polite enquiries reveal the mood board is alive and well all across London, and probably the world too - I’m willing to bet that many companies around town have their 20 most common brand values laid out as boards on a shelf somewhere that they can just wheel out as and when called for.

So if they’re so popular, what’s the problem?

Well firstly, clients tend to think that the moodboard IS the design. Apparently (so my sources tell me) a major London museum is about to reveal a new logo based almost entirely on a clipped image on a moodboard. You hear stories of moodboards created from images taken from flickr and FFFFound and just know that whole creative departments have been tasked with ‘emulating’ the feel of a particular visual style, whether it be Michael C Place, or Alex Trochut, or whoever is top of the on-line hit-parade.

Moodboards for me act in precisely the reverse way that they are meant to, becoming visual straightjackets, not launch pads. I can see why Account Directors would love the idea that their designers are neatly hemmed into a visual corner before the design proper even starts (‘mmm, structure for the creative process, I like that’), but the idea of a few pictures from Getty supplying the entire visual inspiration for a project makes me almost queasy. It’s formidably difficult to take six A2 boards of ‘stimulus’ and distil that down into a logo - I challenge any creative to do genuinely challenging work with all that tat propped up in front of them.

I still (perhaps naively) believe that projects should wallow around in some sort of picture and alphabet soup for a while before finalising on a visual approach (ie ideas first, style second). I still think that designers should be tasked with finding or creating that approach, not a bunch of on-line picture editors.

Also (and this is going to annoy some people, so apologies in advance) there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between the companies who swear by mood boards and the quality of their design work – the boards might be helping someone, and might help in research, but it isn’t helping with the final product.

But, apart from that, I think they’re a great idea. Just don’t ask us to do any for a project. Please.

By Michael Johnson

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24.07.08
Making time

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We still get quite a few submissions to the ‘Time’ section of our main website, so here’s a round up of recent ideas, which we might adapt for the main site, when we get some spare, er, time.

Martin Pyper sent us a link to this little movie.

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David Elliott sent us this.

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Rebecca Warbuton was exploring the time it takes to think about time.

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And Sarah Melloy sent us this.

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Keep them coming.

The ‘time’ email address has become submerged in spam, so best to email your ideas to info [at] johnsonbanks [dot] com.

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21.07.08
Posters made possible?

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We made the point a few ‘thoughts’ ago that perhaps London could have its own gallery of graphic design if we could just find a million pounds to to pay for it – the point being that the V&A actually has a phenomenal poster and graphic design collection that hangs out of public view, due mainly to issues of space and money.

This thought seems to have sparked quite a bit of interest – several people have been in touch, most notably a colleague from Lincoln University with the observation that perhaps rather than waiting for Martin Sorrell or suchlike to walk into johnson banks with a cheque for those many pounds in his pocket and a corporation tax bill to avoid (slightly unlikely in current ‘crunched’ circumstances), why not harness the philanthropic pockets of the countries' designers, advertisers, colleges and practitioners.

So rather than the entrance to the gallery featuring the obligatory Sackler/Gulbenkian/rich-bloke/blokess name credit, you’d have hundreds, perhaps thousands of names. All for one and one for all, 2d designers working together for the common good - their own poster gallery?

Initially, of course, this seems like a daft idea. It’s easy to bandy about numbers here, such as there are 20,000 students studying design at any one time in Britain, so if they all donated £10 each you’d quickly establish £200,000 towards your total. But as we know they’re all hard up and scrabbling to save shekels for their next can of spraymount or sheets of letraset.

But if you change the way you think about this, the numbers start to make a bit more sense. Consider the fact that there are 3,150 graphic design companies in the UK – if they were asked to pledge £100 each towards a new gallery (not that much, when you think about it) that’s £315,000? That’s a third of our total. Now, let’s presume we can get the significant industry bodies to chip in £10,000 each, and the big ad agencies to give 5k, that could be another couple of hundred. Let’s assume we can get 50k each out of the big poster companies (like Clear Channel and Titan), and that’s pretty much it. And then a couple of big headline names, say a Saatchi and a Hegarty (just for sake of argument). Imagine the credits board worked a bit like that student who sold his web page a pixel at a time (and made a million in the process), so the more you donated, the larger your name on the credits board?

Maybe we could combine this with another auction (taking a leaf out of Lincoln’s book here) – famous poster designers from around the world could donate two copies of their best known pieces to the fund, everyone could bid for them, the winning bidders get one poster, the other goes to the collection, and the funds go straight into the pot (with a nice little ‘made possible through the generosity of so-and-so’ credit line umbilically attached to the poster for evermore. Not bad?

We like this. This is starting to make sense. If you’re reading this Mark (Jones, director the V&A), drop us a line. Let’s do it.

And if any other readers have some thoughts, please contact us on info [at] Johnson banks [dot] co.uk

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16.07.08
Assemble with care

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The johnson banks studio is primarily made up of graduates from just two colleges, Kingston and Central Saint Martins.

A few eyebrows were raised when this piece, a few weeks ago, featured work by a Kingston first-year student. So, in the interests of balance, here’s an interesting project by Central Saint Martins first-year Jamie Hearn, who set about finding a way to combine that classic Ikea-style exploded diagram style with typography. As you do.

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Nice work. His website isn’t quite up yet, but keep an eye on www.jamiehearn.com, it will be ready soon.

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15.07.08
I.D. magazine exhibition

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Anyone in New York this summer can visit the exhibition of the I.D. annual review winners which opened last week at Parson’s school of design, featuring 130 examples of design across eight categories (including one of our pieces, as reported last week).

The exhibition is at the Sheila C.Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, 66th Fifth Avenue, 13th St New York until the 28th September. There are some of the other winners in this short piece on Unbeige.

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14.07.08
Send it on a postcard

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We received an interesting link today to a up-and-coming book on postcard designs, titled POSTCARD.

Now, we know these compilation books are becoming ten-a-penny and you can almost buy a book on ‘how to use foil blocking in layouts’ or ‘24 designers discuss their favourite weight of Helvetica’ but this one looks pretty good. It has 136 contributors and a special cover containing 20 free specially designed postcards by the likes of Vaughan Oliver, Daniel Eatock and Andrzej Klimowski.

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The book has been written and complied by Agathe Jacquillat and Tomi Vollauschek of FL@33, there’s more information here and you can pre-order now, or wait until the end of the summer for a real copy.

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09.07.08
The Beatles and I.D. magazine

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American I.D. magazine has just (very kindly) made our Beatles stamps ‘best of category’ in graphics in their 54th annual review, on US newsstands this week. Other category winners included the iPhone in the Consumer Products category. We’ve reprinted their review below, and following that a brief Q&A.

Beatles Stamps

It’s a familiar cliché: No bigger than a postage stamp. Diminutive. Trivial. Easily overlooked. Yet for the three jurors who pored over the hundreds of entries in the Graphics category, a set of six commemorative Beatles stamps mounted on a modest black board caught their eye most forcefully.

Created by Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks for Britain’s Royal Mail, the stamps portray the Fab Four in casual stacks of LPs, each topped with an essential album from the band’s brief history. Since their release, they’ve become the U.K.’s best-selling (non-royalty) stamps.

Six images, six perfect packages; in the end, there wasn’t any question. Goldberg summed it up: “This condenses design down to its perfect moment. It’s emotional, it’s beautiful, it’s simple. It isn’t about whether it’s good typography or bad typography, it’s about an idea that ultimately says it, 100 percent.” For Dixon, the stamps balanced emotion and brand familiarity—always a tricky tightrope for designers. “You feel good looking at them,” he said. “You feel those record covers, and I like how the Queen’s silhouette works on all six. It’s a clever way to reference the Beatles’ visual history without taking it over the top.” Martin appreciated the project’s populist appeal: “I’ve never seen stamps like these before,” he said. “I like that something so simple and well-designed can become so popular—that millions of people get to enjoy something of that quality.”

Clearly, what most set the Beatles stamps apart from their competition was scale: In the same way that we love kittens and babies and Shrinky-Dinks, experiencing a 12-by-12-inch album cover reduced down to something, well, no bigger than a postage stamp triggers a mysterious endorphin inside us. As Goldberg said, “This is the one thing we got all smiley over.”

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Q+A with Michael Johnson, Johnson Banks
Your firm has been designing stamps for years. What’s the range of your projects?
We did some pretty dull cats-and-dogs stamps at the turn of the century, but in 2003, we managed to get through a very unusual set of fruit-and-vegetable faces: 10 basic stamps and 72 stickers you used to build portraits on them.

I remember those; they were in I.D.’s 2004 Annual Design Review. Whose idea were the Beatles stamps?
The Royal Mail’s. Amazingly, they had never done any Beatles stamps and decided the time had come. Their hook was the 50th anniversary of Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting, in 1957.

All our jurors loved your brilliant stack-of-LPs motif. What other designs were rejected?
We looked at many different ideas: haircuts, instruments, even a series of “walking” stamps that ended with Abbey Road’s famous crossing. Luckily, a failed attempt to place the album covers on a ’60s shag carpet—with accompanying cigarette butts—gave me the idea to just use the covers on their own.

Nice recovery. Another favorite was each stamp’s unique die-cut shape. How difficult was that to sell?
When I had the thought to do it, I immediately rang the client to check that we could do asymmetric stamps. They phoned back days later with a tentative, “Yes, maybe.” I was in continual fear that the stamps would become regulated into one arrangement by the production process, but in the end we managed to keep them all different, with random edges that followed the shape of the album stack. To be honest, the toughest bit was designing the perforations to carefully follow the edges; the holes have to be equally spaced, 0.9-mm semicircles. It’s true! How geeky does that sound?

Quite! What advice can you give designers whose final product is one inch square?
The biggest challenge is to keep looking at things in actual size—don’t blow them up at all. It’s incredibly frustrating at first, but you adjust to it. The simplest ideas always work best.

Okay, final question. You, Michael Johnson: Beatles or Stones?
Well, as far as albums owned, it has to be the Beatles. But as for “tracks I can play on guitar,” I think it’s the Stones. Does that make it a tie?

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The piece can be found here on I.D.’s website and other winners can be accessed via the pull down menu.

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07.07.08
The cosmos, examined

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For the last week or so, there’s been an entertaining discussion about our recent Sendai project on the US-based brand website, Brand New. Thus far, not too savage, which is a relief.

Our original post on this project can be found here.

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06.07.08
That seems a bit familiar

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With art directors idling away hours of their day glued to their screens, flickr and YouTube, it should come as no surprise that on-line applications have an increasing influence on the way everyone works. Only last week we followed an entire design route based around an image found on flickr that provided an interesting ‘start’ that found a completely different ‘end’.

But it’s pretty clear that some are using the internet as the end in itself. Christian Marclay’s record sleeve collages from the 90s...

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...seem to have had a direct influence on this ad campaign for a France’s neufmusic.fr (there’s more detail here).

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It may be of course that Marclay himself did the collages himself, but there’s no evidence that he did - his thought seems to have been ‘borrowed’ by a couple of art directors.

Anyone subscribed to visual bookmarking sites like ffffound will have been entertained by the more recent phenomenon of sleevefacing, where old album sleeves are used to replace real people’s heads (as recorded here on flickr).

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The sleeveface site documents this in more detail, as does flickr strings like ‘I am a record cover’. Great stuff.

But it shouldn’t come as any surprise that an ad agency has now emulated this idea, this time for London radio station Smooth. So here you have it, sleeves as faces. Lose yourself in Smooth Radio. Er, yes.

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Billy Joel, George Michael, Blondie? Now perhaps we’re being unkind, and the agency Dye Holloway Murray actually ran an on-line competition on flickr to find the best sleeveface and then gave prizes to the winner? Or maybe they were the ones who kicked the whole craze off in the first place? Maybe.

We suspect, however, that in in time-honoured ad-man tradition they saw the idea, showed it to the client and went home early. Job done. And in the odd copyright world that flickr and ffffound operate in, no-one really cares about a nice idea being appropriated by an ad agency, because that’s hardly big news any more, is it? But if this is the beginning of a new trend, more and more people might need stronger ways to protect their ideas.

Update: it appears (according to Dye Holloway Murray) that the campaign was ‘done in association with the sleeveface.com website’ (who have yet to recognise this as of today but maybe they are going to post about it soon), so fair play to Dye Holloway Murray for crediting sleeveface.com as inspiration

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03.07.08
The world’s first museum of graphic design

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Most people when quizzed about the Dutch will reel off clichés about clogs, cheese, carrots and/or the colour orange and easily available drugs. Soccer-jocks will eulogise about ‘that volley’ by Van Basten, or more recently Sneijder.

But mention Holland to graphic designers and they go a little dewy eyed. They’ll know that a tiny nation, about 5% of the population of the USA, has had an entirely disproportionate influence on their business.

From Piet Zwart and Willem Sandberg to Ootje Oxenaar and Wim Crouwel, from KesselsKramer and Irma Boom to Experimental Jetset and Mevis en Van Deursen; that’s nearly a hundred years of groundbreaking design in one sentence. Their émigrés such as Rudy Vanderlans pushed pixel-based design under the noses of American designers and Gert Dumbar’s two stints at the RCA have influenced generations here in London.

Most of us are guilty of simply piecing together transatlantic design trends, with the occasional nod to Japan, but forget the Dutch and you miss a significant part of the jigsaw. Spend any time in Amsterdam and you’ll admire one of the few city identities that actually works (courtesy of Thonik) and you’ll visit one of the world’s finest design bookshops (Nijhof and Lee).

Much has been made of the relationship of Dutch designers with their clients - someone to collaborate with them in their search for new ideas, not someone to tell them what to do, when, and which colour to use. Many London companies do government work of a dubious, committee-crushed standard, but the Dutch government’s sponsorship and encouragement of their designers is legendary. Max Bruinsma once saw this as a “combination of analytical professionalism and artistic freedom, that has led to a nickname for Dutch graphic design: ‘official anarchy’”.

Not content with their position of ‘most admired official anarchists’, the Dutch have pulled another fast one on us by opening a Museum of Graphic Design. The little town of Breda, previously known for a castle, a church and the birthplace of Elvis’s manager (Colonel Tom Parker) rolled out the PMS 485 carpet for Queen Beatrix on 11th June. The museum says it’s mission ‘is to gather, manage and maintain information and knowledge about the history of the graphic design profession. This knowledge will be passed on in an accessible and comprehensible way to the young, to young adults, to the general public interested in culture and to professionals’. So there.

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‘The world’s first museum of graphic design’ has a great ring to it. I’d love the world’s second to open in London but that would take some doing, persuading and financing. After all, London has its Design Museum, and the V&A bills itself as ‘the world’s greatest museum of art and design’.

We all know, of course, that graphic design is just a constituent part of these institutions, not the lead story. Yes, the Design Museum has featured exhibitions by Fletcher and Barnbrook over the last few years, but under its new regime you suspect a move back to edges, form and 3d.

The only recent significant UK exhibition of graphics was Rick Poynor’s Communicate at the Barbican, in 2004. Rewind, at the V&A (2002/3), was by definition a cross-discipline show, and before that you have to go back to The Power of the Poster in 1998. One of my greatest revelations, whilst assisting with the curation of the latter, was touring the V&A’s vast and very private poster archive. Lautrec’s, Mucha’s, Cassandre’s – they’re all there, some the size of a wall, most never to be seen. Every year or two I strike up an informal conversation with the museum about ‘finding a gallery for all those posters?’ and the response is always the same – ‘have you got the £1,000,000 to pay for it?’. Er, not currently, no.

But is London that badly off? US designers were recently debating on Design Observer the Art Institute of Chicago’s Graphic Thought Facility show. Alice Twemlow’s view that the Institute chose ‘the equivalent of an indie movie’ whose ‘distinctly unostentatious work, is relatively unknown in the US design community’ is revealing, as is Michael Bierut’s comment that he would ‘love to see a graphic design blockbuster.. ...at a US museum sometime in my lifetime, but I’m not holding my breath’.

Tokyo, of course, has long been the leader of the pack, with two galleries dedicated to the graphic arts (the GGG gallery and the Creation Gallery) in Ginza. But these feature temporary exhibitions only, not permanent. So the Dutch have even stolen a march on the Japanese.

Perhaps Breda, located in the south of the country, is a bit of an obscure location? But if the French town of Chaumont can ring-fence the art of poster design for their annual festival, then Breda could well become the museological epicentre of graphic design, just by being first.

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