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28.09.09
What’s in a name?
A few weeks ago a client sent me an unusual new business approach he’d received. In an odd twist on the traditional approach, a company has been set up called ‘Bob!’ that markets itself as the ‘Easyjet of design’, advertises its low day rates (just £340 a day) and says it is backed by another design company, Glazer design. 
Some of this is quite odd - firstly the budget day rates, secondly the ‘diffusion line’ approach to its product and its backer. What’s to stop someone going to ‘Bob-Glazer’ and not going to the presumably more expensive Glazer itself? (After all they’re both based in the same building, and all the projects advertised at Bob! are in fact old Glazer projects). Then there’s a further twist: the name ‘Bob’ is already in use by another design company, set up 7 years ago by several Kingston graduates (with the surnames Burgess, O’Connor and Burkhardt, hence the BOB acronym). 
Now, when companies choose slightly generic names for their company, (and none of the founders are actually called ‘Bob’) then you can run the risk of confusion. But in the eyes of the law, it’s pretty simple – if a reputation of a company has been built in the public domain, use of that name by another can be seen as ‘passing off’. So when MARK studio, based in Manchester (they of several nice projects over the last few years)… 
…discovered that another ‘Studio Mark’ had been set up they had to go through a lengthy but ultimately successful legal process to get them to desist. That’s what the original ‘Bob’ face with the new ‘Bob!’ Even though the original Bob has done some notable projects (such as the Bill Amberg animals at the top of this post), set up the offshoot Bob Books (in 2006) and has had its fair share of attention in the design press, it will still have to invest time, money and legal fees to deter their rival. 
Imagine if someone set up and ‘stole’ your name, and refused to give it up. That’s how this feels when it happens. But ‘new Bob’ have made a fatal error. 3 years ago, ‘old Bob’ and SAS collaborated on a Land Securities annual report which was well received and eventually shortlisted at the 2007 Design Week awards. 
Guess who ‘new Bob’ have been emailing about their new company and service? You guessed it. Land Securities. If that isn’t a clear case of passing off, then the law’s an ass.
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23.09.09
Last gig of the tour
The posters have arrived and are going up. 
Strings have been changed. 
The pedals are checked. 
The amp’s on 11. Last reminder: the Guitar and Graphics extravaganza has its last gig of the tour tomorrow lunchtime at the V&A.
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22.09.09
Olympik poster exhibition
Opening today, as part of this week’s London Design Festival, is an exhibition organised by Grafik magazine, with collaborators SEA Design, GF Smith and Team Impression. They asked thirty-nine UK based graphic designers to create a poster interpreting an Olympic sport or discipline. Johnson banks were given the Triathlon. 
After some thought we plumped for redesigning an athlete’s foot (or Triathlete’s foot, we should say). We went for stronger, better spaced and slightly webbed toes for the 1.5km swim, a heel converted to a spare cog for the 40km cyling stage, and treads incorporated into the sole for better grip during the 10km run. We’ve persuaded Grafik to let us show a sneak preview of some of the others below (apologies but we can’t show all 39). 
Studio Frith were given Free Wresting. 
Cartlidge Levene: Sailing 
Non-Format: Track Cycling 
North: Rowing 
Sea: Diving 
Angus Hyland: Artistic Gymnastics 
Noah Harris: Athletics. The exhibition is only on for short period (until the 24th), but the posters and a catalogue are for sale with profits going to sport-related charities. More info here.
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21.09.09
Matsuri Japan 2009
When the Japan Society asked us to design the symbol for the autumn festival at Spitalfields market, we hadn’t realised just how huge an event it would turn out to be. Apparently 35,000 visitors came to watch the myriad events on Saturday. That’s pretty impressive.
The logo takes the Kanji for ‘Matsuri’ (which is Japanese for festival)...
...and fuses it with an ‘A’ and a ‘J’ to form part of the logo. We wanted to find a way to symbolise the Japanese and Western traditions coming together, and this seemed a perfect way. 
It’s been designed so it will work equally well horizontally or vertically. 
Here are some applications we spotted on the day. And (of course) a bento box. 
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18.09.09
Cabe’s 10th Anniversary
A couple of nights ago we were at the 10th anniversary party of CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment). We’ve been working on several projects timed around the anniversary, one of which is a ten year review of the organisation’s work. Here are some of our favourite spreads. 
It’s fair to say that the real star turn of the evening (apart from the review, obviously) was artist Dr Michael Pinsky, who had suggested that those who had RSVP’d to the event take part in a large scale art piece. This seemed to involve people arranging bits of an aerial view... 
..then having to piece it all together, whilst clutching warm chardonnay, all the while trying to not knock anything off the walls of the Saatchi Gallery. Very entertaining. 
There’s a great gag in this to do with ‘how many architects does it take to finish a jigsaw’ but they’re a good client. Maybe we shouldn’t go there. Happy birthday CABE.
There’s a scalable interactive version of the art piece here. There’s another of our recent projects for CABE here.
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16.09.09
Old tech week: the 23 year-old Apple
A few years back we took a car full of stuff to the local skip, and marvelled at the collection of old-tech kit collected there. But then we looked a bit harder - what was that lurking in the corner? 
Reversing the accepted rules of engagement with the dump (ie we took stuff away, not left it) we scampered off with a 1986/87 era Macintosh SE. With one megabyte of RAM! Just recently we had a spare moment to indulge in a bit of Ebay action to source one of those weird green putty-coloured keyboards, and that lovely old square mouse. 
And since then, we’ve been cooing away in front of our new toy... 
...which is especially good at jaggedy Avant Garde headlines. Classy. 
It’s an odd trip down memory lane seeing these control panels again. 
And we’ve managed to work out that it was last used in 1996. 
Trouble is, we’re not entirely sure what to do with it now. Maybe find an old copy of Coreldraw, or Pagemaker and load it up? Trouble is, we’d need them on floppy disks. Tricky.
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10.09.09
Oh, London
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a stone for the last few weeks, you’ll have struggled to ignore the fact that Our Great City of London (or the Greater London Authority and its Mayor, to be precise) have decided the time is ripe for a re-brand. It’s been holding a highly controversial public tender - with the Olympics looming, it seems there’s a desire for a unified visual approach for the city. The whole ‘brand’ for London issue was probably kicked off by the various ‘ON’ variants introduced by previous Mayor Ken Livingston. Which was then confused further by Visit London’s own variant on the theme (they’re the tourist ‘bit’, in case you’re wondering). 
In the early noughties there was meant to be an overarching ‘brand idea’ (courtesy of Interbrand) which became known as ‘London Unlimited’ and involved some fairly standard stock shots and slightly dodgy kaleidoscope graphics that no-one wanted to use. So no-one did. In the meantime, Film London was done, Visit London was done by Wolff Olins... 
…and johnson banks and Circus did the inward investment arm which was re-named Think London. 
Put all the elements together, and yes they were disparate. And a bit confusing. So another attempt was made in 2006/7, this time by Wolff Olins, to bring the ‘essence’ of London together, and a thought based on ‘London: Planet City’ was presented, but never adopted. 
In the meantime, Visit London (courtesy of Saffron) adopted some nicely centred Akzidenz (as you do), and apparently tried and failed to persuade the other players to adopt the same livery. Maybe they were asking ‘why Akzidenz?’, who knows. 
Step back from London (and typography) for a minute and you can understand why one of the world’s greatest cities would want a coherent, strong, central brand. After all, look what Amsterdam did – they removed 55 separate department logos and replaced it all with the three crosses of the city flag. 
Very nicely done. A round of applause for our orange friends, and their designers, Thonik. (Although it was almost immediately confused by this I Amsterdam work, but that’s besides the point). 
Just as ‘I love New York’ will continually complicate any attempt by New York to rebrand (ie there’s a famous symbol there that isn’t going away), any attempt by ‘London’ to change its spots faces an immovable, immutable object with a century old back-story – the London Transport Roundel. No-one with any brains is going to change that. It sums up ‘Transport in London’, yes, but it currently sums up ‘London’ as well. 
Add to that the furore concerning the London Olympic logo, and any attempt to draw those nice, neat, clean up slides that brand consultants like to do is immediately buggered. 
You can propose all manner of smart symbolic devices to draw together parts of the equation, but some significant parts aren’t going to re-brand. Cue messy diagram. Anyway, back to the pitch. The bit that’s got everyone talking is that the GLA, in their own sweet way wanted people to wade through a massive tender questionnaire, write some pithy words on the issues, and oh, yes, chuck a few scribbles in while you’re at it. The legal, ISO-thirty-three-thousand-and-thirty-one tender stuff in current UK tenders is tricky enough. Add in the ‘how multi-racial is your workforce’ questions, then the ‘please tell us the sexual preferences of your designers’ stuff and tempers start to fray and evenings lengthen. But apart from assessing exactly what sexual habits have to do with logo-design, anyone left with an ounce of self-esteem is left with a very ethical conundrum – ‘yes I want to have a shot at London’s logo, but do I really want to be giving ideas away for free?’ At johnson banks, our route through these tricky waters was to write the obligatory pithy document, but rather than show any designs per se, we showed a few brief diagrams then concluded that actually, perhaps they should consider this? 
(Yes, of course, we’re being biased, but we’re always being told it would make a great logo for the city so we thought we’d propose it). Unsurprisingly this, er, single-minded approach has gone down like a proverbial lead balloon, and no we haven’t been asked to go any further. No surprise there then. Several notable figures such as Martin Lambie-Nairn have already denounced the whole thing, and many people have rightly queried whether chucking a few hasty scribbles in a document is really the right way to go about this, or indeed even remotely professional. One brave/reckless/misguided/inspired (choose your own adjective) approach came from Moving Brands who set up a public website for this public tender. They’ve also been shown the door, which, considering the amount of work they did, was probably quite gutting. The issue here isn’t so much who will be selected (the pain of the process means only the larger groups have the firepower to get through the tender requirements), the issue is what will be chosen. We know that the London Olympic bid logo free pitch was a fatally flawed process: remember, from 1100 applicants that included this… 
…they could only choose this. 
The ‘real’ 2012 involved proper presentations from proper companies, but there seems to be a feeling at the GLA that someone somewhere got bounced into the final Olympics logo, and the hoo-hah that came with its launch was perhaps undesirable.There’s a view that this time around, real Londoners should be involved, or at least have a say. How the ‘public engagement’ part of this project will manifest itself is yet to be seen. Any attempt at further ‘free’ or ‘public’ designs will only result in more mockery and/or accusations of crowd-sourcing on the grandest of scales. Only the briefest of skims through the entries so far to Moving Brands self-initiated competition reveals just how scary design can get when placed in the hands of the public. 
What can we conclude from this? That buying big design projects in this country continues to be completely inept? Maybe. That the chances of London getting a decent logo are pretty slim? Perhaps. That London already has its unofficial logo, and that’s the famous roundel? Probably. 
Maybe we’ll get a logo straight out of ‘brushstroke central’, the universally accepted design approach for tourist brands. 
But here’s the best bit. When is the logo needed for? The first of November. So that’s 7 weeks to consult, engage the public, design and implement a highly controversial brand that will have to co-exist with the TfL roundel and the Olympic mark, whilst gluing together all the other, disparate organisations? Oh, London, what have you done…
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09.09.09
Wish they’d played the old stuff
Some pics from yesterday’s Guitars and Graphics talk. Hummer not ours, honest. 
Crowd? A bit quiet. Stage-diving? None. Sainsbury’s bag on stage? Not cool.
Reaction: ‘The bollocks’ said D&AD. ‘7 out of 5’, said some delegates (shouldn’t that be 11 out of 10 to be a bit more Spinal Tap?). 
Johnson: ‘I fluffed too many bits. I’m rusty. I need to work on my tone. I’ve got a lot of work to do for the 24th’. 
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08.09.09
Clearing up confusion
A few eagle eyed readers have been in touch checking on the dates of the Guitars and Graphics talks. We can confirm that the dates are correct (phew no need to re-print the t-shirts then). So that’s today at the D&AD Xchange conference, and lunchtime on the 24th at the V&A, more information on the (amended) website here. The V&A talk is free, please call +44 (0)20 7942 2211. Tickets available from Sackler Centre reception on the day.
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04.09.09
Guitars and Graphics. On tour
It’s over a year since Interesting 2008, at which johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson delivered a chaotic 20 minute speech on the crossover between Guitars and Graphics in the 20th century. The 2009 expanded remix is now ready for its autumn tour (hence the t-shirt) - next week at D&AD XChange (the annual conference for design educators) and at the end of September at the V&A as part of its London Design Festival week. The lecture involves the traditional keynote slides and general banter whilst Johnson plays various acoustic and electric guitars, cues Quicktime and stamps on a vast pedalboard. Could all go horribly wrong. All tours these days need merchandise, so here's the poster and more t-shirting. 
The XChange conference is a pre-booked 2 day thing, more information here. The V&A talk is a free lunchtime talk (1-2pm) on the 24th, in the Sackler Centre, with tickets available on the day. More info here.
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01.09.09
Summer time pieces
We’re still catching up on the summer backlog - here are some of the recent entries to our ‘Time’ project. 
Kimberley Chan sent these great buttons. She told us that ‘My mum buys me a badge every year for my birthday and I've collected them all in a wooden box which I've had since the first badge.’ Bless. 
Meanwhile Chris Bassett says ‘My submission is a poster displaying some information of the date and time of my birth. I have also written a small piece on the importance of time, and making the most of it while we have it.’ 
Kerrie O'Neill has sent us this rather poignant piece, called ‘modern love story’.
And just the other day Chris Bassett sent us more: a photographic piece that ‘represents the passing of time through the photography of several pairs of converse, with the newest pair positioned in the foreground.’ 
This project stems from a section on our main site dedicated to people’s responses to an open brief of Time. Feel free to send us your ideas (info at johnsonbanks dot co dot uk), the best ones are posted here on Thought for the week.
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