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25.02.10
Thanks Vynsie
We find ourselves strangely inundated with fresh enquiries about our tree poster. It seems that it’s featured on the achingly hip home and product website*, Design Sponge, featured in the apartment of a Ms Vynsie Law. Her rather nice pad in Hollywood Heights, East Dallas, features the poster as you can see. What great taste, Vynsie. Here’s a few more snaps. Never realised East Dallas was so groovy.
Go here for more interiors. Go here to find out more about the poster. Want to buy one? Email lizzie [at] johnsonbanks [dot] co [dot] uk *Not a sentence we anticipated writing
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22.02.10
Flaunt it
The latest offering from Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit’s Under Consideration franchise is their portfolio book, Flaunt. It mixes questions and answers with established designers about what they expect from a portfolio, with images and examples of how a collection of younger designers present their work.
Scattered within are carefully designed information pages that help prospective job-seekers decide how many examples of work to include in their book, how long the interview might last, and so on. Given that portfolio advice is the one thing that students value the most, this could be a smart and valuable addition to many reading lists very soon. 
On this side of the Atlantic, my first reaction is that some of the portfolios seem a little bit over the top. But that could just be cultural differences - perhaps things are a little more understated over here. Anyone turning up at johnson banks towers with a folio that looks like more effort went into its hand-tooled binding mechanism than the work itself might set off a few alarm bells. But the vast majority of our pre-hiring and screening is now done electronically (ie via pdf, or online), so when we see the actual person we know the work and are more likely to be judging the person, not the binding.
Conversely, I’m pretty sure that the world’s design students preparing their foray into the job market this summer (or middleweights waiting to re-enter when things pick-up) will appreciate a book full of different approaches to a common conundrum.
The Q&A with established designers is very revealing: the authors posed 9 questions to 17 designers from around the world, such as ‘How many pieces would you say make the perfect portfolio?’ or ‘What would you say are the most common mistakes made in portfolios and presentations?’ Yes, the usual respondents are there, such as Bierut, Shaughnessy and Sagmeister, but they’re there because they usually have something interesting to say.
Here’s Stefan Sagmeister on his first portfolio: ‘Oh no, that one is long, long gone. It was a gigantic 30 x 40-inch piece of shit. I had lots of printed posters that I couldn’t bear to fold in half. It quickly proved to be an incredible schlep up and down subway steps. I think I took it out twice, and then gave it up and moved onto something more portable’. And Michael Bierut on the best portfolio he’s ever seen: ‘About a year into my first job, a new graduate, one year younger than myself, dropped off his portfolio. My boss had all of us look at it. It was the best portfolio I’d ever seen, absolutely perfect in terms of design, craft, and stylistic and technical virtuosity. It made me want to give up the game. It belonged to a kid named Clement Mok, who went on to become design director of Apple Computer, founder of Studio Archetype and Sapient, and a president of the AIGA’.
In true Under Consideration style, there’s an unusual and practical spin to the actual release itself – in the way that their admirable tome last year Graphic Design Referenced simply included drawings of old, famous and almost clichéd pieces of work (because the cost of reprinting them would have been too prohibitive) the twist this time is that the book is available either as a printed tome or a downloadable pdf. Opt for ‘pdf’ and it’s a mere $15 (that’s just £9.69 at today’s rates). Considering that you’re bound to glean several useful tips, which could clinch the next job, that’s ten quid well spent, I’d say.
By Michael Johnson.
There’s more information on this release here.
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17.02.10
Post-it philosophy and graphic design
Regular visitors to this web address will know that we’re interested in why people become graphic designers, given that it’s a fairly unusual career path (and no-one seems to give the same answer twice). We’ve been asking friends and tutors this question for some time, and Rebecca Wright, course director of Kingston’s Graphics + Photography course has just asked her 3rd year students. Here are some of their answers, filled in anonymously on small pieces of yellow paper. 
Good stuff. But who is Kimm Stevens?
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16.02.10
A Phonetikana t-shirt (maybe)
Late last year we applied some of our ‘Phonetikana’ thoughts to some T-shirt designs for Uniqlo, and we’ve just found out that one of them has been shortlisted. Now, bear in mind this is not really a shortlist, more of a longlist of er, 200. Also please bear in mind that we weren’t really concentrating when we sent the design and apparently it’s got something to do with the Cannes festival, hence the preponderance of dodgy Lion designs (note to selves: next time read the brief properly). 
Anyway, eventually the favoured 20 or so will become t-shirts and the world’s groovy young things will be seen sporting them. Or something like that. You could vote? If you want. Only if you want. No pressure. Honest.
Here are some of our other favourites. 
Phonetikana is a typeface we’ve developed that integrates phonetic sounds with the Japanese Katakana script. So the Japanese for ‘soo-pa-hee-roh’ is written in the style of the logo at the top of this post. There’s more information here.
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11.02.10
Copyright, copywrong
Last week poor old Men at Work, eighties Australian songsmiths, came a bit of a cropper in the copyright courts when a Sydney court ruled that yes, the flute solo from ‘I come from a land down under’ did sound a little too close to the campfire favourite, ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum tree’ (and actually, if you hum it to yourself, it is pretty close).
It’s hardly big news that a piece of music sounds like another (after all, if you can only choose from 12 notes, some similarity is almost guaranteed) and there are many examples of this happening before - George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and The Chiffons' He's So Fine being a classic example.
What surprised me a little was that the original ‘Kookaburra...’ was written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, a teacher and girl guide leader. Even taking into account the fact that Men at Work’s hit came 5 decades later, it seems that they had infringed the rights of the music, and the late Marion Sinclair herself, since the copyright to her ditty continues for 70 years after her death (in 1988), so until 2058, to be precise.
It made me wonder what copyright rules exist in the visual arts, since I was under the impression that there was a 50-year cut-off. It seems that various principles apply.
For sound recordings and broadcasts, copyright expires after 50 years. For film, it’s 70 years so if you’re at film school now and want to rip-off some noir black and white classics, make sure they were made before 1940.
In writing (classed as ‘literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works’) copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death, so Salinger’s classic will stay ‘his’ for another 69 years.
In design? It seems that logo designs would be probably be deemed ‘artistic’ and would also be subject to various registrations/trademarking. But, yes, if you own one of those ‘1930s trademarks and symbols’ books, you could in theory now plunder at will.
The really interesting one though is work deemed as ‘Typographical arrangement of published editions’. To a graphic designer I think that means ‘layout’. How long? Just a pifflling 25 years. So, do the maths - any design layout designed before 1985 that can’t be deemed artistic is now theoretically copyright free (not the photographs or illustrations contained of course) but the overall layout of elements.
How about this from 1983? Up for grabs. 
Some 80s Neville Brody? Anybody’s.
The entire Nova back catalogue? In theory, out of copyright.
The entire contents of Typographica? Or continual typo favourite Typomundus (see here, here and here).
What a weird discovery. I’m pretty sure I don't think this is a good thing. By Michael Johnson. There’s some useful legal stuff here. Thanks to Ed Taylor for the legal pointers.
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05.02.10
iPonderings
It’s hard to believe that it’s still less just a week since the iPad was launched. Steve Jobs says it’s like ‘holding the internet in your hands’. Critics have compared it to Barack Obama, as living up to impossible expectations (or not). Bloggers have (mainly) savaged it, but they of course savaged the iPhone too. Stephen Fry, somewhat breathlessly, thinks Jack Bauer will want to return just to download schematics onto it. The Economist has gone all religious on us, and whilst asserting that ‘some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them’ has declared that ‘even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles’. So there.
Meanwhile, UK advertising’s weekly bible, Campaign, asked johnson banks’ Michael Johnson to review it, from a design perspective. Here’s what he thought.
It’s a little tricky to review the iPad without actually having one in my hands. But, assuming that ringing doorbell is the FedEx man or an Amazon parcel (not a review copy from Jobs and Ive), I’ll try to do it, virtually.
From a product design perspective it’s clearly an extension of recent Apple themes. It shares the black and aluminium aesthetic that runs through their entire product line. It’s very thin – amazingly only 1mm thicker than an iPhone.
Size-wise, it initially disappoints (I’d hoped for something closer to A5), but to get an idea, fold your edition of Campaign in half, hold it upright and imagine that you’d lopped another 30mm off the bottom. (Or, if you’re a designer, fold Design Week in half, hold it upright and add an inch to the width)
The weight of it will be great. I’m writing this on a 15inch laptop, weighing almost 2.5 kg – the iPad will only weigh just over a quarter of that. If you want to cycle and run (or amble) to work, or are always dragging hefty laptops to meetings and airports, it could be a genuine game changer. And it’ll save on those physio sessions for broken shoulders.
If your idea of fun on a long flight is to boot up Photoshop and indulge in a bit of high end retouching then you’ll be disappointed, but you’d imagine that Adobe will be thinking hard about ‘CS 4 lite’ very soon.
Our Californian friends have been mainly re-purposing iPhone software for this new ‘third-way’ type of product (ie not phone, not laptop, but somewhere in-between). Put 6 iPhones together and you’re close to the size of the actual screen - you can see why the world’s suppliers of apps and games are genuinely excited. We’ve all done that irritating up-and-down-sizing of a website on a phone – all of that will be over if it’s as fast and as net-friendly as it seems in all the demos.
The family-friendly apps like photos, calendars and video have been re-designed for the bigger screen, but this isn’t just a home toy – the increasingly ubiquitous Keynote software has been re-jigged and made available at a very low price. You could do that next conference defiantly ‘hand-luggage only’. Forget the extra iPods and hardbacks, just whack the music on this, download some Malcolm Gladwell ebooks and order the room service.
My only reservation? Will I really be able to write on that keyboard? I hope so. But I’ll need a real one in my hands to really test that out, obviously. Purely for research, you understand.
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04.02.10
Demons out. Or we eat all the soya beans.
Obviously 2009 was a tricky year for lot of people, so what better way to cleanse all that away and drive away the evil spirits for the coming year. Cue Setsubun at johnson banks. Essentially the toshiotoko, or male head of the household... 
...gets to grab handfuls of roasted soyabeans... 
...and rather than eat them, chucks them at the rampaging ogres, shouting ‘Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!’ (‘Demons out! Luck in!’). 
Then you can pig out on the soyabeans, but only one for each year of your life. (Not sure about this rule, seems a little stingy to us.)
If you're looking for an easier option, the Maneki Neko (or Beckoning Cat) should bring your business good luck. (The cat's beckoning, not waving, by the way).
So, there you go. Roasted soya-bean-chucking and a small cat = new business coming out of your ears. Or something like that.
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02.02.10
Posters available, space needed, thoughts welcome
A serious new year clear-up has made us realise just how many posters we have in the archive that we designed for La Villette. Over a seven year period from 2000 to 2007, we designed hundreds of items every year for the cultural park in the north-east of Paris. A great project to work on, and the highlight was the posters - major events each had their own bespoke designs, 1.5 metres tall and a metre wide. 
We’re not entirely sure how many we did, probably hundreds, but it’s struck us as we sort through them that there must be between thirty and fifty of them that are pretty reasonable. 
We think they’d make a great exhibit of some description, but we’d need a huge space to do it. Then it occurred that our Thought for the Week readers might have some suggestions?
Long shot, obviously, but if you're interested in exhibiting 50 massive French cultural posters, or know someone who might, drop us a line at info(at)johnsonbanks(dot)co(dot)uk. Ta. This post from a while ago shows some of the highlights of the series.
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