The past week has seen various attempts by team johnson banks to get away from our desks and banish those January blues.
We were there for the end of ‘Skate’ at Somerset House, practicing our synchronised skating routines.
They’re coming on pretty well.
After that came a visit to the Science Museum for its monthly ‘Late’ night where children are banned, there are four bars and 3,000 twenty-and-thirty-somethings descend on one of London’s favourite institutions. They’ve become amazingly popular evenings.
In between discussing quantum physics over Bacardi breezers (or maybe the quantum physics of a Bacardi breezer), there are chances to visit Launch Pad without tripping over the buggies, discover whether its lifts really can hold 24 people...
...do the quiz night and enter the colouring in competition. Runners-up in that, sadly. Must try harder.
Late last year we were asked to make some notes and gather some images on how our Beatles stamps came about. We duly did what we were asked and collated some images, assuming it would maybe a page of text and some little pictures.
Consequently, there’s some surprise at johnson banks towers that the piece is, er, 6 pages long. Interspersed with proper images there are what were tiny scribbles of unsuccessful routes (like ‘exploring lyrics’) blown up a little larger than expected. Whoops. Still. Looks OK. Ish.
The piece appears in the January Edition of Computer Arts projects magazine.
Regular Thought for the week readers will know that there is a music/guitar/jazz/geek theme running just under the surface here, so this is a quick detour to preview Pat Metheny’s new project, called The Orchestrion.
By rigging up electronic solenoids attached to hammers and mallets (and then to computer composition software), he’s devised a way to arrange and trigger a vast array of musical instruments, including a loaned drumkits from Jack de Johnette, a vibraphone from Gary Burton and a whole heap of weird stuff including tuned water bottles.
Then he’s a composed a series of tracks that are played ‘live’ by this phenomenal one-man orchestra, with him the only actual human allowed in the band.
Sounds like a potential disaster, but from the previews so far, it’s quite something, albeit tricky to describe. Best watch this YouTube piece if you’re interested.
Or play this to hear the music.
The album is out in a matter of days, and a world tour kicks off any minute, with one solitary date in London at the Barbican on the 10th of February. Can’t wait.
Late last year we finished the first phases of a major rebrand for the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia.
They approached us in 2008 to help them re-organise themselves under a new name, whilst finding a way to recognise the various initiatives that were being brought together.
This is how the various elements presented themselves before.
Although they wanted at one level to present themselves as a unified ‘Pew Center’, they still wanted to show that they worked across dance, exhibitions, arts fellowships, theatre, management, heritage and music, all within the Philadelphia area. And they wanted to let their initiatives sometimes still use their current names. What you might describe as a tricky brief.
After a lengthy design process, we started thinking of the centre and its constituent parts a little like ‘cards’ that we could shuffle and reorganize – the part you wanted to represent was simply the one ‘on top’. But, crucially, we allowed glimpses of the other initiatives to peek out behind the main card.
In terms of the main logo, it has three states, as below, depending on what level of detail the organisation wants to portray.
Then there are several other ‘states’ of the logo, where the elements re-arrange themselves to leave the initiative name on top, and a minimised Pew Center square.
We’ve developed several animations to help explain their new structure.
Here’s the animation for the whole centre.
And these are variants on the theme for exhibitions...
...and fellowships.
For the website the new identity becomes a live navigation device (see grabs below and the actual site is here).
Allied to the core identity idea, we’ve been designing and art directing a series of applications, from ram-punched brochures…
…to invites and concertina leaflets.
There’s signage for the head office, visual thoughts for DVD’s and films, even full sets of printed stationery.
The end of the year meant Christmas party invites and, unbeknownst to us, they gave out logo tattoos at the do. Now that’s a first.
Some progress images on the Ravensbourne project we’re working on. Here are some shots of the Penrose tessellating tiles being applied to the outside of the new building.
As someone quipped on a recent site visit, ‘it’s like the biggest jigsaw puzzle you’ve ever seen’.
As well as working on the overall brand and identity, we’re also giving some thought to the internal wayfinding. Even after 3 site visits we’re still scratching our heads a bit over this one: inside it’s a maze of interlocking floors and gangways.
Here’s a side view of a typical floor - you can see how the circular windows work like giant portholes.
More soon. The identity should be showable by the Spring...
13.01.10 If print is dead then this is a very long goodbye
Ever since the nineties and the advent of cyberspace, futuregazers have been quick to pronounce the death of ink on paper.
After all, take a quick look around the design world and ask yourself which sectors have a secure future? Branding? Almost certainly. Digital? Er, yes. Animation? Of course. Product and 3d? Absolutely.
As a contrast, just a quick scan of the ink-based sectors reveals the slow death of traditional media - The poor Observer’s demise is predicted on a weekly basis. The Guardian’s midweek sales are by all accounts terrible. Blogs can showcase, discuss and dissect new ideas weeks, even months before journals. In the next few years we’ll see if the Kindle will put a torch to those paperbacks that gather dust on our shelves.
And the pace of change will only get greater: the most heard client request last year? ‘Can you show me what it will look like on an iPhone?’ Not many of them say ‘I know, let’s do this as a limited edition foil blocked book’.
There’s probably now a clear age-divide over print versus digital. Designers over 35 were drawn into the profession by traditional means – album covers, posters and club flyers, messing about in the screenprinting department at school. Generation Y (or whatever letter we’re up to now) has been using and abusing Powerpoint for a decade at school or dabbled with their MySpace backgrounds. ‘Album covers’ are now 50 pixel-wide pictures on their iPods, not gatefold cardboard experiences. Digital ‘stuff’ is home, not away and it’s unlikely that they’re drawn to design via traditional means. ‘Doing a nice bit of print’ is more a creative curiosity rather than a craving.
At the turn of the last decade, many of London’s design companies still treated ‘print’ as the bedrock of their business. Designing annual reports was both creatively excellent and profitable, now they are on-line pdfs. A statement such as ‘let’s do a series of posters for this project’ would be met with enthusiasm and interest - now clients will just grin politely and change the subject. Or just ask ‘why?’
Entire corporate identities can be designed, detailed and virtually artworked before someone asks – ‘hang on, what about the stationery’. The dreaded phrase ‘electronic stationery’ has taken over, a process best summarised as one where your favourite layouts are radically re-interpreted (ok, destroyed) by the blunt instrument that is Microsoft Won’t (sorry, Word).
For some, adjusting to the change has taken time. In the nineties, johnson banks would produce dozens, sometimes hundreds, of posters a year. Sixty by forty inches remains a favourite size, and the receiving of the proofs, the smelling of the ink? Fantastic. We all learned from the masters and virtually every one of them (Hoffman, Brockmann, Fletcher, Glaser) built careers around getting ink onto paper via the poster.
But if printed stuff really is dead, either someone hasn’t told us or the message is taking a heck of a long time to get through. Bookshelves groan with new magazines, specialist shops like London’s Magma and Amsterdam’s Nijhof and Lee are stuffed to the gunnels with new design books, every month. Magma even opened their third shop, specialising in graphic ephemera and general printed curiosities, and it’s survived the recession.
Some sectors still need printed things – in education the students check out prospective Universities online, but their parents still like a glossy prospectus for the coffee table, and if tens of thousands of pounds are being committed to an education, you can’t blame them. In other cases, ‘print’ seems to be becoming much more DIY. When producing ‘things’ for V&A fetes and xmas cards we’ve unearthed new and unexpected sources of income. An old and infamous poster on the ‘life of a graphic designer’ has been reprinted three times - sales of it must be up to three or four hundred, and counting.
It’s no coincidence that Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook have started their own publishing enterprise – they’ve judged that there’s still a market for the kind of book that they love and would want to buy themselves. They can print as few or many as needed, and if the books prove viable probably pocket more than the standard ‘5% of net’ royalty that induces depression in most budding design authors.
This move to self-publishing and production will probably continue. If posters just become big pieces of paper held up on design blogs for other designers to coo at, that’s not really viable. But if they buy them? Well, why not?
The word ‘blue’ written in Katakana is prounounced ‘boo-roo’. This set us off thinking about western images associated with those sounds, which led to ghosts and kangaroos. Obviously.
08.01.10 Getting those pesky resolutions out of the way
OK so it’s a terrible cliché but you know, sometimes we do keep to them. So, rather than embarrassing anyone personally, here are our collective New Year’s resolutions (in no particular order).
Pass my driving test
Learn to use Garageband
Learn to use Logic
Learn to play the Saxophone (again)
Stop biting our nails
Be less pushy
Get a serious boyfriend by late summer
Plan a wedding
Give up smoking (again)
Learn how to tile
Sleep more and tile the bathroom
Make our other halves happier
Start writing a diary
Write another book
Learn to write Japanese
Learn French
Move house
Do a talk about design and guitars whilst playing the saxophone
Start life drawing lessons
Build a Ukelele
Learn to play the Ukelele
Write happier posts on the blog
There you go. Doddle.
Update: also, ‘Do better work’ (same resolution every year) and ‘re-do our website’. Yes, it’s about time.
We’re still catching up with ’09 posts really - perhaps we haven’t genuinely committed to the New Year yet?
Here’s a great typographic advent calendar that our last rather good placement Jo made us as a Christmas present. Lovely idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to see these on-sale in November rather than the usual nonsense.
Apologies, a hectic end to ’09 and an equally hectic Xmas break mean this review is now SO last year. But, anyway, on with it, the third time we’ve done this and this year with multiple suggestions from our loyal readers, thank you.
So, in no particular order..
The ‘wish we’d done that’ projects of the year One of our personal favourites has to be this Japanese meat label packaging by To Genko.
The white food labels are specially printed to detect ammonia and darken when meat begins to go off. This means that a dark blue label = ‘off meat’, but the really clever bit is that the bar code is also nullified so it can’t be sold. Genius. And genuinely useful too.
Everyone rightly loves these Dixons ads by M&C Saatchi, and what a great endline (Dixons – the last place you want to go). Brilliant. Will scoop every gong going.
Several people have suggested Alan Clarke’s Olympic posters. It’s interesting that a student project on the Olympics has gathered more praise than the ‘real’ Olympics work on the logo and now its equally controversial symbols.
Designer of the year Well, we have to go with J Abott Miller in Pentagram’s New York Office. Here’s just a few of the projects he was involved in last year.
Brand success with possibly the world’s worst logo Nominated by Stephen Taylor as a good logo, but we think he’s joking - Brawn GP. What looks like it was designed over a weekend ended up being plastered all over the Championship winning car for precisely one year. How anyone decided that the ‘BR’ should be roman and the ‘AWN’ italicised is beyond us.
Proof, perhaps, that a terrible logo will not slow your car down one little bit. One in the eye for design effectiveness, perhaps.
What’s happening in blogville? Whilst the established blogs like the Creative Review blog and Designboom still deliver the goods, since its re-design Design Observer feels less and less like required reading. Why is that? Within the niche world of branding and re-branding, Brand New continues to showcase the most interesting developments and manages, just about, to keep its commentators under a degree of moderation. Design Assembly should be encouraged too (but maybe it needs to lighten up a bit this year?)
Several blogs we won’t name-check have virtually lapsed completely into constant self-promotion. In difficult times this is probably understandable but makes for pretty tedious reading. Perhaps happier times will fix this, or maybe the simple naivety of blogging is virtually over and just about everyone’s out to make a buck nowadays. Shame.
Weirdly, we’ve been having the most fun reading simple blogs dedicated to single issues. Here’s a great example: My Parents Were Awesome, dedicated to hideous (but hilarious) photos submitted by readers of their parents.
In the words of the site itself, ‘before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome’.
And the new but fantastically written ‘I am the Client’ which tracks the relationship of its hero, marketing director Dave Knockles, with his advertising agencies, trashing all reputations along the way. It’s worth reading from the oldest post up, if that makes sense (but if you’re swear-word-phobic, watch out). If you’re short of time just start with this fantastic decimation of the whole concept of ‘the agency planner’. Genius.
Richard Heap wrote and suggested Letters of note, which is new to us, but looks great and will hastily go into our news readers.
On a slightly weirder note, how about this, Post Secret, consisting of secrets sent anonymously on postcards.
Back to design, a newcomer to this blogging malarky is Sean Adams’s ‘burning settlers cabin’ which, despite its odd title, turns out to be a hilarious ramble through the mind of one of California’s funniest designers and the seemingly endless 50s and 60s kitsch that turns him on. Great stuff. And he has already surely broken the record for the amount of times he’s featured a picture of himself and business partner Noreen.
The ’09 chutzpah award… …goes again to Wolff Olins for continuing to push the boundaries of identity design and getting up the noses of most of the blog commentators at the same time.
Ok, their Aol scheme might look like a scheme we’ve all presented without much hope at some point, but you know what? They got it through.
It’s a strange commentary on current identity design that one of the biggest firms often tries something new, whilst the smaller (and in theory nimbler) ones often don’t. Odd.
Ad of the year Even UK advertising’s most esteemed organ, Campaign, described 2009 as an ‘annus horriblis’ for advertising, by refusing to nominate an agency of the year which, for a creative sector especially skilled at congratulating itself, says quite a bit. It’s tough though, isn’t it, to think of great ads you’ve seen this year? We’ve already mentioned the Dixons campaign, and we’re going to go with those Meerkats again, slightly out of desperation.
Music of the year Going on the simple rule of ‘most played in the office’ then the albums of the year would have to be Grizzly Bear (Veckatimest), The Animal Collective (Merriweather Post Pavilion), Bat for Lashes (Two Suns), Florence and the Machine (Lungs), Passion Pit (Manners) and the Dark was the Night compilation. And it’s only a month old but we’re already loving Them Crooked Vultures.
For the more niche music-heads, our doom-rock instrumental-post-rock band of the year has to be Russian Circles. Our metal album of the year was Mastodon’s Cracke the Skye. Blues album of the year? Matt Schofield. Are we getting too niche now? Maybe. The online music breakthrough of the year had to be Spotify. But you already knew that.
The ‘F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me’ award Single of the year was looking tricky (Passion Pit’s Little Secrets?) then got very easy – Rage against the Machine’s victory over the Simon Cowell (s)hit factory.
A carefully orchestrated internet campaign stopped the UK Christmas chart topper being the X-Factor winner (for potentially the fourth year). Never was a chorus so appropriate.
Book of the year Well, we’ve had some hugely varying nominations, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the new compilation of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures. In design we’ve enjoyed Graphic Design, Referenced by Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Unit Edition’s first foray, Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio (but gee, that type is small).
An interesting nomination came from Jacob Pover for Massimo Vignelli's 'The Vignelli Canon', up until now only available as a pdf download (but a real version is on its way in 2010).
The trends of the year Overall, everyone’s still talking about Barack Obama, Steven Fry’s tweets and MP’s expenses (here’s a picture submitted by Richard Holt).
Oh, and Flashmobbing adverts.
Christopher Skinner thinks the design trend of the year is hand drawn/scribbled fonts and suggests that our Save the Children work had something to do with it… maybe…
Matthew Day suggests the 'Papercraft' trend as design trend of the year. ‘It’s annoyed the hell out of me because so many of the examples of it have been brilliant and I am insanely jealous’. Stephen Walker is looking forward to better web typography in 2010 thanks to Typekit, and if what it suggests takes off then yes, typographically things could get a whole lot better in web-ville.
Most over-hyped things... Danny Elliott has suggested The Olympic Pictograms, and we can see why. ‘I can appreciate they are hard to do but come on, they are awful. But then again, I said that about the logo, but I like that now. It’s no easy task designing somethiing that needs to be 2,3 and even 4 years ahead of itself’.
Ollie Winser is very bored of Florence and the Machine (already?).
Andrew Kingham wrote and asked that everyone stop using Rosewood (seems a bit harsh) and illustrated his point accordingly. OK, fair enough.
A graduate whose been doing the placement rounds (might keep the name quiet for now) has suggested we have a new ‘Mad about Moodboards’ award and he wants us to give it to Interbrand London. Mind you he also wants to award Interbrand with the best in-house cafeteria award too. Evens itself out really, doesn't it?
Steal of the year Ken Li has alerted us to this great story where Leo Burnett Hong Kong scooped a grand prix at an awards scheme for their ‘sweat’ campaign that had a, er, ‘striking resemblance’ to a series of images produced by UK photographer John Ross for the Manic Street Preachers' Lifeblood album in 2004. Those images were a collaboration with art director and designer Mark Farrow.
What no-one seems to have noticed is that the John Ross photos already built on work by Giles Revell from a few more years previously. Ah well.
The ‘I really don’t need one but I’d really like one’ product of the year We’re very excited by this product, which appears to be a miniature midi keyboard/synthesizer, we think. Very nice, can we have a beta copy please?
The design prediction for ‘10 Well, our notes say ‘the year Augmented reality becomes everyday’, which may well be true. But if all the rumours are correct, this will be the year of the Apple tablet.
And after a decade of lugging around not-very-portable portables, we can’t wait.
Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to a better ’10.
PS We’re still thinking about the whole ‘design of the decade’ thing. Give us a bit longer to get our thoughts straight on that one…
Another highlight of a snowy New York: The High Line.
The High Line opened in the summer and runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to midtown, between 10th & 11th Avenues. The first section opened in June, and gets up to about 20th street (eventually it will run all the way to 34th street).
It was originally an elevated railway in the 30s, and was constructed a couple of stories above the street.
You get a unique view of the city from a different angle and many buildings and billboards are cropped off at unusual angles, or the track runs entirely through buildings.
The sun loungers were maybe a bit optimistic in sub-zero temperatures.
The High Line design team was a collaboration between landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations, and architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
