One of the senior members of the johnson banks design team, Kath Tudball, was speaking at last week’s Kyoorius Designyatra conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Her topic was the Malaysian concept of ‘campur-campur’, which roughly translates as mixed up, or mixed together. This seemed a logical choice of theme because she herself is a mix-up (of English and Malay parents), works at johnson banks (merrily mixing all types of design and nationalities together in a determinedly pluralist environment) and all of us seem to live in an increasingly mixed-up world.
 
Malaysia itself is a mixed up kind of place – Kath’s earliest memories were of a bizarre dessert known as ‘air batu campur’ which is made from mixed ice, green syrup, pink syrup, gula melaka (brown sugar), evaporated milk, palm seeds, beans, jelly, sweetcorn, cendol and nuts…

Her teenage years were a contrast of suburban winters in Twickenham and summer holidays in the colourful chaos of Kuala Lumpur, surrounded by the mixed cultures, languages and food.

After another campur-campur in the multi-cultural melting pot of Central Saint Martins, more blending came to fruition here at johnson banks. Here’s an early example: Parc de La Villete’s combination of parks, people, exhibitions and entertainment...

 ...became a ‘grassworld’ where the grass of the park became symbolic objects for the year.

Soon after, the same park became a mechanical garden, where the park’s famous architecture became the plants.

Other projects at johnson banks happily throw cultures together: for this symbol of UK and Japanese collaboration the English letters are mixed with the Japanese characters for ‘Nihon’.

An older johnson banks project for the British Council on language…

…prompted an examination of a Malaysian linguistic trend known as Manglish. This is where English and Malay are literally squashed together in a bizarre mix that has developed naturally and organically. Some examples of Manglish are phrases like ‘where got’…

…or ‘so action’.

Both phrases sound absurd when read out of context but when you see their provenance, they make a kind of sense. Another great (but bizarre) example is ‘gostan’…

The big question though, is whether campur campur is on the rise, or decline? Just a quick look around the globe reveals mash-ups in almost every part of life: Ashwariya Rai may have started in Bollywood but is now so well known she’s a face for L’Oreal worldwide.

Nigerian/British artist Yinka Shonibare mixes traditional African textiles with western Victorian costume.

And a certain Barack Hussein Obama’s a pretty high level campur campur, isn’t he? (The product of a Kenyan father and a white American mother).

Even in identity design, we’re seeing high-level mash-ups and multiculturalism being celebrated, not covered up. Japanese retailer Uniqlo, whose name originated from the ‘Jinglish’ for unique clothing (yoo-nee-koo-roh), has now introduced the Japanese logo into its international stores, so the Japanese and western logos now co-exist.

Are we going to see more or less campur campur? Or in Manglish: Campur Campur, CAN or NOT?

It’s pretty obvious: CAN.
 
Kyoorius Designyatra Malaysia was held on the 13th and 14th of November. Other speakers included Wally Olins, Neville Brody, Vince Frost, Kenya Hara and Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates.

Recently we tried to persuade the marketing director of a ‘luxury’ brand that, despite our lack of significant experience in their sector, we’d enter it with our eyes open, with fresh ideas, unencumbered by the received wisdom of the sector, etc etc etc.

It was no great surprise when we weren’t selected. Nor was it a bolt from the blue to hear that they had shortlisted some ‘luxury branding specialists’. In difficult times it’s a gamble to appoint people on strength of thought rather than proof of pudding, let’s be honest.

The trouble is, appointing puddings often just exacerbates the ‘me-too’ look that many sectors develop. Let’s take luxury branding as an example. Flick through a recent copy of Vogue with your hand over the logos (we call this the ‘thumb test’) and it’s virtually impossible to differentiate one brand from another. And they all use Kate Moss as a model, just to make it even more confusing.

Stack luxury logos up on a slide together and, well, letter-spaced capitals are pretty much the order of the day.

But luxury isn’t the only area afflicted. After the ‘hiccup’ of the London 2012 logo, candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics have retreated to the safe havens of ribbons, stars, hands, people, rings and the Olympic colours.

If you were a visiting alien trying to decide which bit of earth to visit first you’d be forgiven for thinking that every country on earth was a riot of primary swatches populated entirely by jolly, colourful, excitable earthlings brandishing paintbrushes and giving away free hugs, beer or flowers at the airport.

If you then got bored of the beach and fancied touring the world’s mass transit systems (well, you’re an alien on a scoping mission after all) you’d probably get your bus pass for one muddled with your carnet for another.

And if you decided to trade in your Martian dollars to invest in some of earth’s ‘global’ companies, you might find yourself struggling to differentiate them too.

But these trends aren’t just restricted to style of logos - it applies to colours too. The majority of financial institutions use blue, or would like too. (The easiest presentation you’ll ever make is to stand in a British boardroom and say ‘well we’ve thought long and hard about this and we think the answer is to write your name in caps, in blue’). Established charities love red. New charities love green. Emergency and breakdown companies love ‘alert’ colours like yellow and orange.

Obviously there are some logical reasons for all these choices – brushstrokes (in theory) signify freedom and vitality, yellows and oranges stand-out in headlights (so make logical breakdown colours), red equals blood so can be a powerful colour for appeals and grabbing attention, and so on.

Sometimes an early, classic piece of work is so enduring that it defines the look of a sector, so the identity developed for La Caixa bank in the eighties (in conjunction with Juan Miro) seemed to encapsulate modern Spain and struck a chord in tourist offices everywhere. Soon paper collages were the ‘must-have’ style for their logos.

London Underground wrote the early visual code for transit systems at the beginning of the twentieth century. And then the post-war period that saw Canadian Railways, Japanese Railways and British Rail adopt ‘track’ based logotypes and symbols made the ideas open-source, for the world to adapt as their default setting.

For designers and thinkers trying to provide something new in these sectors, breaking through this pervasive, herd-thinking behaviour is hard to do. By definition, standing out from the crowd can attract ridicule, and risk. But the longer you see herd-thinking first hand, the harder it becomes to defend it.

Maybe it was fine to follow, once. But not any longer.

This is the beginning of a series looking at how people and organisations try to break out of the mould, what succeeds, and what doesn’t. The images above are borrowed from a multitude of sources, and special thanks go to Brand New and Cicade dos Logos for the loan of some of the collections.

Most designers will name a particular book that they keep boomeranging back to, a groundhog day tome that helps them through difficult times or 11th hour deadlines. Only a few weeks ago, British designer Mike Dempsey was sharing one of the books from his collection, ‘Dorfsman on CBS’, name checked only days later by Michael Bierut after Dorfsman’s recent death.

At college, being introduced to Herbert Spencer’s Pioneer’s of Modern Typography was a breakthrough moment for me, as it had been a decade earlier for Peter Saville (although how I ever thought I was going to successfully recycle all those pages of woodblock constructivism with a Grant Enlarger and some Letraset is anyone’s guess).

I worked with one designer whose copy of this book, The Dictionary of Graphic Images never left his side. Never.

How creatives use their ‘desert island’ design books varies – for some they just help to unlock frozen minds at critical points. Some great but perhaps overused books like ‘A Smile in the Mind’ can become resources to be mined indiscriminately. Of course, if you’re struggling with a brief on ‘seeing’ then perhaps the spread on ‘eyes’ from the graphic images dictionary will be useful...

...or the chapter on christmas cards from A Smile in the Mind, but you could argue that all you will be doing is adding (yet another) ‘eye’ solution or ‘rudolf’ gag to the canon rather than thinking of anything particularly original.

But occasionally, watching what books people return to again and again is far from clichéd and genuinely instructive. I once worked with a very gifted art director in Australia whose typographic touchstone was very unusual. Hidden under his desk, in a special drawer, was a heavily thumbed, torn and ripped copy of Typo Mundus.

Typo Mundus, (or Typo Mundus 20, to give it its full title) was organised by the International Center for the Typographic Art who had an ‘an idea to preserve and document a collection of the most significant typography of the 20th century’. ‘An exhibition was conceived and the call for entries resulted in more than 10000 submissions from all parts of the world. A jury of 12 designers selected some 500 entries for inclusion in the book’.

Ok, sounds fair enough, so why the fuss? Well, it dates from 1966. That’s one clue. Another clue? The judges, which included Anton Stankowski, Louis Dorfsman, Piet Zwart, Roger Excoffon and Herman Zapf. Blimey. And then there’s the work. It’s hard to think of another book where so much incredible work is so crammed together from typography’s glory period. Here are a few examples, picked pretty much at random.

Any designer even remotely interested in big, punchy sixties type should get hold of a copy, as soon as you can. For a book that’s 42 years old, it’s hard to beat, and my Australian colleague had good reason to treat it with such reverence. And yes, he did refer to the work, but he used it to push him to look for better ideas, not just as unknown reference to plunder indiscriminately.

The good news? You can pick up copies on Abe for less than twenty dollars. The bad? I can only see six left.

By Michael Johnson.
(Update: sorry all the copies on Abe have gone)

We’re straight into production on the barrel project. First thing to do is work out some of the technicalities. We want to embed words into the barrel pieces, so we’re testing different processes like etching...

...or sand blasting.

We’re determined to do something with the hoops, but that means being able to recreate perfect, rusty rivets.

We’re collecting and cutting as many barrels as we can as we plan out a large piece that could use up to at least six barrels.

We’re still trying to find a way to write on the insides of the barrel staves, but they are seriously charred, which could prove to be a problem.

We’re also investigating if we can rebuild a barrel without the hoops on the outside, and how to stop it falling apart.

We’ll post more of these when we have something working a little better.

This is the latest in a series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’re tracking the project on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here, the fourth was here.

After months of research, distillery trips, making test sculptures in polyboard, deconstructing real barrels and pursuing a few blind alleys, we’ve finally got an idea that works for our Glenfiddich project.

We’ve been looking for a way to construct designs and art based on whisky barrels that somehow communicates the truly vast amount of time the alcohol spends in a cask (between twelve and thirty years).

We finally had a bit of a breakthrough when we began to think of the elements of the barrel as having clear ‘jobs’ to do, for a clearly defined amount of time. So, for example, one single spring has supplied the water for Glenfiddich for over a hundred years.

So perhaps we could arrange some barrel slats in this way, and etch, or cut a sentence into the side, such as ‘for 132 years our spring has been our single source’. As a thought we liked this - it follows the ‘time’ theme but lets us use the barrels and the distillery in a much more unusual way.

As another example, we thought that the barrel ‘bungs’ had an interesting role, either to state how long they will act as gatekeeper...

...or imagine what they would say once their barrels were opened.

The 20 year old whisky spends 20 years in American oak casks, then it’s is finished off in rum casks (a sweeter flavour, or something like that) so we wondered if we could show that somehow. Perhaps like this...

...or like this.

The distillery still grows some of its own barley in the fields opposite. Maybe we could show that somehow, with side-etched slats?

(In case it’s tricky to read it says ‘we still grow whisky in the fields by the distillery’).

We’ve also been trying to think of a good way to use the barrel hoops: maybe as typography that we could build or weld, then display at the distillery itself?

On a similar theme of using the distillery as a backdrop, we wondered what would happen if we stencilled onto the lids of the barrels that wait to be filled up again, to make a sentence, such as ‘we will wait our turn’.

So. The good news is, the client really likes the idea. Of the dozen or so ideas we presented on this theme, we’ve decided on 5 to develop further into real ‘barrel art’. The ideas above, although we like them, are the rejects. Harsh, but true. It’s now full steam ahead to build our final five.

This is part of a running series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’ve agreed to ‘log’ the project’s progress on Thought for the week.

One of the johnson banks team hails from Michigan, originally, and arrived with election cookies this morning.

It’s true that Obama-fever has filtered into the studio. We're sporting Obama screen-savers...

...we’re loving the Obama as Santos conspiracy theories.

Neatorama made us laugh.

As did the ‘Gum Election’.

We’re even getting Obama spam. Quite groovy type, we thought.

Then we ate the cookies.

A few years ago I remember Dick Powell (he of Seymour Powell fame) telling me that one of the greatest memories he had of being a parent was going to the V&A musuem one day, en famille, sitting down in a line in one of the galleries with pencils and paper, drawing the sculptures. I remember being impressed, and also a little envious that he had children prepared to have a go at something quite so daunting.

You still see people doing this, occasionally, but it’s quite rare and takes courage to take a sketchbook into the midst of all that marble. But that’s exactly what the eldest Johnson (aged twelve) and I decided to do last Friday.

First of all, a quick stop at Green and Stone (London’s finest art shop) to stock up on paper and charcoal, then into battle in Albertopolis.

It’s important to point out two things at this point: I’m not retelling this to make any dubious point about the Johnsons being great draughtsmen (which as you’ll see, is clearly untrue), or to claim any ‘superdad’ bragging rights. To be honest I’m only describing a few hours whiled away in Albertopolis because it was surprisingly great fun and one of the most challenging things I’ve done for ages. (It’s about 20 years since I was last in a life drawing class, I don’t know about you).

The funniest thing about this is that our drawings look nothing like the sculptures, neither do they look like each others. So here are our slightly dodgy warm-up drawings of Aimé-Jules Dalou’s terracotta bust of Eugenie Maria Wynne…

…which frankly look nothing like the real thing. We put that down to beginner’s nerves.

Yes, this bust of Pope Clement XIV by Christopher Hewetson is wearing a cap, but the younger Johnson chose to concentrate on his face, whilst Johnson the elder struggled with a profile.

Ok, they don’t look that great but it’s really, really hard. Bear in mind that you have hundreds of tourists walking past as you draw sneaking a peak – they don’t really say much but their silence is often deafening.

Our last attempt was this rather beautiful, but pale, lady.

Again, we could easily have been drawing something entirely different.

Even though our attempts are pretty hopeless, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Seriously. If you have kids, or nieces and nephews who like drawing, you have to give it a shot. The best (and cheapest) analogue day out I’ve had for ages.

By Michael Johnson

If the American election were held today and an east-coast cabal of American graphic designers had their way, Barack Obama would be in by a landslide. For months now, cyber-space has been groaning under an avalanche of carefully crafted democratic devotion.

If you’ve noticed Shepard Fairey’s striking pro-Obama posters, you’ve only scratched the surface – there’s now a flickr page devoted entirely to digital remixes of it. Here’s the original...

...now here are the parodies.

Just a casual interrogation of flickr reveals a series of poignant uses of Fairey’s image, such as this interesting piece of flyposting...

...or this version transferred onto brick and shot with, er, a jumping friend. As I write there are at least 155,000 images tagged ‘Obama’ on flickr alone.

Obviously, there’s quite a difference in tone in the candidate’s campaigns, but dig deeper and you’ll find detailed discussions of virtually everything; each candidate’s chosen typeface (true); the layout of their websites (true); the brand attributes of Obama’s approach versus McCain’s (true); whether Obama has managed to make the letter ‘O’ his or not (also true, but does it still belong to Oprah?). Have I read that Obama = Mac and McCain = PC? I can’t actually remember, but it sounds plausible, doesn’t it?

Writing from this side of the Atlantic, this degree of obsessive, forensic analysis seems a little over the top. UK politicians understand the principles of ‘appeal’ and ‘image’ but their visual communications are often lacklustre (apart from a few last minute 48 sheet advertising posters). New Labour’s red square logo ran in parallel with Old Labour’s red rose for more than a decade – whilst their co-existence was odd, and rarely peaceful, it didn’t stop Blair winning 3 elections.

Dave’s Cameroonies revealed their squiggly green tree replacement for the torch recently, to almost universal shrugs of disinterest in their newly ‘green’ credentials.

But maybe, just maybe, design and mass communication could be making a difference this time. Obama, hailed as the most media-savvy democratic candidate since Kennedy, is running the ‘first real transmedia campaign of the 21st century’ according to designer Brian Collins (when interviewed by Steven Heller for the New York Times). ‘His people not only understand how media has splintered, but how audiences have splintered, too. Cell phones, mobile devices, websites, e-mail, social networks, iPods, laptops, billboards, print ads and campaign events are now just as important as television. I’ve worked with giant, global corporations who don’t do it this well’.

This is a view echoed by others. Sean Adams (of Adams Morioka) feels that unlike previous democratic campaigns, ‘Obama seems to have learned from past mistakes and has maintained a remarkably well designed visual, verbal, and written message that does not lurch from idea to idea’.

The candidates’ typographic choices are telling to designers such as Paula Scher: ‘McCain’s logotype was Optima. Obama’s was Gotham. It spoke volumes about their campaigns. Ordinary people didn’t understand what that meant, but every designer did. The ordinary folk simply grasped it intuitively. It was just the difference of old and new’. Stephen Doyle asks ‘would you put your money on the font derived from thriving America in its heyday of capitalism (sigh) or the one drawn from the graves of Italians (mama-mia!) who finished thriving five centuries ago?’ Indeed.

When asked by Heller, typographer Cyrus Highsmith pointed out that ‘for some reason, almost every dentist and orthodontist seems to use Optima for their letterhead. Therefore, while Optima is a great typeface I tend to associate with getting teeth drilled’.

Speak Up’s Armin Vit feels that ‘Obama has really inspired graphic designers, and it all started because of his campaign’s commitment to powerful visual communication, which I think signals a sort of coming out party for the profession’. And the ‘coming out’ which Vit refers to is dramatic – amongst the pro-Obama initiatives there’s even a ‘designers for Obama’ website where every day until November 4th designers add new poster designs in support (from which we've borrowed Ron English’s phenomenal ‘Obama as Lincoln’, used at the top of this post). In this new, electronic form, the political poster is reborn.

Here’s illustrator Felix Sockwell’s contribution to the visual debate.

Meanwhile McCain’s graphic supporters are almost invisible. Even a simple photo-shoot for The Atlantic magazine went disastrously wrong when the chosen photographer, Jill Greenberg (known to be left of centre), intentionally made McCain look as pasty as possible and left his eyes red and bloodshot. Whoops.

Then she used the out-takes to create her own, viciously anti-McCain posters. Double-whoops.

(Apologies for anyone offended, but apparently he did call his wife that once, in front of the media).

Luckily Air Bed & Breakfast decided to make cereal for both candidates, but it’s not clear whether sales have been entirely equal. (The running vote on their website leans heavily in Obama’s favour).

Sarah Palin’s whimsy, winks, warmongering and wardrobe have been ridiculed worldwide and have made a global star of Tina Fey in the process. But as Stephen Doyle points out, ‘before her puck was dropped, there was nothing remotely entertaining about this election. Now we are all glued to her appearances just so we get the jokes when they come around on Saturday night’.

Adennak.com’s hilarious debate flow chart that lampooned Palin’s thought processes was so successful (and so bookmarked) they were selling t-shirts of it within weeks.

But, the question remains, can design influence the outcome of an election? The painful memory of Florida 2000’s ‘pregnant chads’ debacle, (when a poorly designed ballot paper almost certainly turned the result to George Bush) still endures. Perhaps it’s stirred the US design community into action and they’re determined not to get the blame again.

In the nineties, Blair embraced the UK creative industries after his landslide victory; in Obama’s case the American creative industries have adopted him before the event, in anticipation of an equally historic return to the left.

Whilst many fear the ‘Bradley effect’ (named after the tendency for US voters to poll one way but turn into the KKK once cocooned in a polling booth), many more fear what another term of Republicanism could do to the USA, and the world. No wonder they’re designing pro-Obama posters. Wouldn’t you?

This is an adaptation of an article by Michael Johnson running in this week’s Design Week magazine. Attempts have been made to link to original images and acknowledge image sources where possible.

We’re getting to the point on our Glenfiddich project when we need to get some thoughts together to show the client. We’re flip-flopping at the moment between ideas that would make great one-offs, and ‘big ideas’ that could run across several installations.

(In case you’re new to this, we’re trying to create some ‘art’ from barrels to reflect the time that it takes to actually create a bottle of whisky).

So here’s a sketch for a one-off — embed wood type (somehow) in a barrel, ink it up then roll it around on big pieces of paper.

Great idea. But how do we do the other 4 barrels? And what would it/they say?

As a contrast, we’ve been wondering if the idea of ‘time’ could be explored on five barrels, and show how people get used to the idea of whisky in their lives.

We’ve also got slightly obsessed with what whisky-makers call the ‘Angel’s share’, which is essentially the amount that evaporates over time. So they’ll open a barrel after 20 years and half of the liquid has gone, apparently to our tipsy-winged friends.

Again, a nice thought, but we’ll use up five barrels on just one idea. We’ve even worked out how to make ‘Angel’s share lights’ by cutting the illustrations out of the barrels. A bit too Halloween this one.

A the same time we’re still wondering what/how we could place text onto the wooden slats in some way, but we’re trying to work out what to say. Would look great if we could find a good way to do it.

Then there is a whole slew of ideas based upon making type up out of a lot of barrels, or hoops, or both.

Well, we can’t mess about any longer. We’ve got to edit some of this, and have some better ideas, and show the client. With a bit of luck the next post will be about which route they’re going for.

This is the sixth in a series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’re tracking the project on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here, the fourth was here and the fifth piece was here. We’ve had quite a few emails of readers’ suggestions for this project, so keep them coming in and we’ll dedicate a post to ‘reader’s ideas’ pretty soon.

A brief round-up of recent media: Creative Review has reprinted a recent post on Designer Monographs in its November issue, out this week.

Johnson banks’ creative director is quoted in Adrian Shaughnessy’s piece on illustration in this week’s Design Week.

And, unbeknownst to us, the Creative Review blog published a filleted version of yesterday’s LoGoReDo on their blog. Unsurprisingly the rotten tomatoes are being thrown in our direction about this so perhaps a bit of clarification is needed.

LoGoReDo is a not-entirely-serious idea about 'fixing' some of the logos that are out there that don't seem to be working. We've been staring at the BT type for 19 years, and the T-Mobile logo for about a decade, thinking ‘surely they could have done that better’. All we did was get some vector artwork and see what happened.

Obviously one’s first reaction is that each organisation should ‘start again’, and doubtless they will when each feels a major re-brand is needed. But these were just gentle exercises in craft, nothing more, forcing ourselves to work with elements already there, trying to improve things, not some Machiavellian attempt to short-circuit the branding process (or indeed the new business process).

Of course it’s unusual to put what normally stays in a sketchbook into cyberspace. A bit like talking to the audience in theatre or looking into the camera in a film - it’s not supposed to happen. And the T-Mobile one comes to a better conclusion than the BT one, it’s true. But they struck us as interesting, we thought our readers might be interested, we posted it.

It seems to be the sheer fact that we did it that seems to have annoyed the CR bloggers. And, by inference, some of the people reading this were annoyed too, so if you're offended, well sorry for that.

In the interests of fair play, feel free to re-design something of ours. We won't be offended, honest.You can send them through to info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk.

Now this is a challenge. The second in our series of LoGoReDo’s is the BT logo.

In case you missed the first, the idea is to take a current logo that isn't working that well and improve it, without changing it radically. These aren’t real commissions (not yet), just graphic food for thought....

Some history is needed before we start: the current logo evolved from Wolff Olins’ original type + piper combination from 1989. When it was decided to update the logo, the type was retained whilst the piper was dropped, to be replaced by the swirling ‘worlds’ logo which had been developed for BT’s Concert brand (which was phased out in 2001). Technically speaking it was meant to be a ‘C’ (for Concert) but hey, let’s not dwell on that.

Obviously, swirly/globe/world symbols are all the rage at the moment, but it’s our view that the symbol isn’t the problem.

The problem is the type. It looked a bit odd next to the piper, and it looks even odder next to the world/worlds.

Some of the problem lies with the outside strokes of the B. In almost every typeface that we all read and use, the outside strokes are least as thick as the initial downstroke.

Here are some examples: always thicker on the outside loops, in order to keep the letter balanced. So the BT ‘B’ contravenes most of the rules we’re used to when it comes to type.

The other reason why it looks lopsided is because, er, it is. Perhaps in an attempt to re-balance the type someone made the inside crossbar longer. Weird.

Just by reducing the white space (the counters) in the ‘B’ can help. Trouble is, now the loops of the ‘B’ look badly drawn.

So the logical next step is to redraw it, properly, with constructed curves and all that.

That brings you here, but a bit of typographic trickery is need were the little arrow is - optically that bit looks too thick so you pull that section in a bit and cheat it, optically.

Which gives you this.

So that’s better. Funnily enough it looks OK on its own, but back in combination with the worlds it still looks heavy (below), even if we lighten the blue a little.

Granted, it's better than where we started (below), but let’s be honest, that’s not difficult. It’s probably what BT should have done when they made the switch, just improved the type whilst introducing the new symbol.

Maybe something more drastic is needed?

What we’ve tried below is to use a slightly expanded, rounded typeface in caps. And we’ve lightened the blue. Looks alright.

Funnily enough it looks better in red, it seems to balance the red dot on the right hand side of the symbol a little better. It still looks a bit weak somehow. This is harder than we thought.

Perhaps something even more drastic? How about curved ends to the type, but asymmetric? Perhaps this will link better with the ellipses in the symbol?

Here we’ve tried the combination, again with a lighter blue.

Or in red. Still not sure. Better though, it’s starting to work as a complete ‘mark’ rather than two elements that don’t quite match.

At this point, slightly frustrated, we tried a completely different tack. If ‘bp’ can be determindly lower case, why can’t ‘bt’?

The angular typeface looked great for about half an hour then stopped working, for us. But we liked the lower case and tried some more rounded variants.

We even wondered what would happen if we let the type be part of the symbol, making it completely self contained?

That’s almost nice. We never thought we’d say that about this logo. Just as a memory jogger the original is below.

Conclusion? Well, that was harder than we thought. Have we found a definitive alternative? Not sure. Are any of them better than the original? Well, you decide.

Our first LoGoReDo was the T-Mobile logo. There will be more. We had some hilarious suggestions after the first post; feel free to email info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk with your nomination of our next victim.

There have several instances recently where an almost forgotten name of British graphic design, John Gorham, has cropped up. Alan Parker highlighted his work in D&AD’s recent 45 years exhibition, and we discovered, whilst writing about designer monographs, that a planned book on his work lies half-done, waiting for a publisher.

Gorham was admired by a generation of designers working in the seventies and early eighties, but because his work was defiantly anti-computer and definitely pre-internet, there’s virtually nothing to be found on him in cyberspace. I’d even forgotten that I had written about him back in the late nineties. So I’ve dug out my notes for that piece and asked around for images, and there follows a partial redressing of the balance.

It was difficult in the nineties to find out about Gorham. Now it’s virtually impossible. You can’t walk into a bookshop and flick through his life history. His name doesn’t appear in Design Week or Campaign. Eye have never run a feature. Creative Review once ran an article, but decades ago. Ask a bunch of twenty something designers about him, and most will frown and shake their heads. Tap ‘John Gorham designer’ into Google Images and you don’t get one single piece of his work. Not one.

Even your writer, who happily stuffs his office and spare room with design books of every size and shape, had to delve a bit before meeting him in 1999, before his untimely death. But it doesn’t take long to find out that the annuals throughout the seventies and eighties are peppered with examples of his work, sometimes as designer, sometimes typographer, sometimes illustrator, often all three. Idly picking up a mid-seventies annual this week, his name seemed to be all over numerous, consecutive pages of editorial work.

It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you discover that, not only did he produce an enormous array of work over a forty year period, but his influence on and collaborations with some of the more stellar (and better publicised) names of the business were far-reaching and highly influential.

Look up that early seventies Windsor & Newton packaging work that Michael Peters and Partners produced (which arguably influenced every range of packaging that followed) and there, in the small print is the name ‘John Gorham, Design Consultant’. One might associate the seventies and eighties work for the typesetter Face with one of its founding partners, John McConnell, but dig again and there is often a collaboration with Gorham.

Or this fantastic collaboration with Peter Blake. The Gill Family? Just great.

A commission from McConnell’s then assistant, David Stuart, to design a pub sign for The Cricketers in 1979 led to a request for a repeat performance from the Partners eight years later as part of a series they were designing for Wood & Wood.

And then there are pieces such as his Red Monarch poster, designed with Howard Brown, that simply stand as one of those paradigm shifts that occasionally arrive and grab graphic design by the metaphorical short and curlies.

Freelance from 1967 onwards, Gorham always preferred to stay a bit of a loner. He never wanted the comfort zone of a big company or partnership, although he could probably have established himself as the equal of that first wave of British design companies (Pentagram, Michael Peters, Minale Tattersfield). He relied on friendships and referral to supply him with a stream of eminent names from film, design and advertising past and present as clients. He did may projects with Alan Parker over the years, establishing a relationship so strong that Parker allegedly warned Paul Weiland off from using him, saying ‘go and find your own designer’.

Hugh Hudson, Frank Lowe, Peter Mayle, Tim Delaney. Aimless name-dropping? No, just Gorham’s client list. Gorham happily span yarns to me about his one-time clients such as the legendary ‘BJ’, Robert Brownjohn, who said to Gorham once ‘I don’t like your big nose, I don’t like the way you dress, there’s absolutely nothing I like about you but it doesn’t mean we can’t work together’. He talked of that time as ‘innocent’. ‘It was like meeting friends from school, you virtually knew everybody because it was so small’.

During his 10 year stint teaching a day a week at the RCA he influenced another generation who were to make their mark in the eighties (such as the late Nick Wurr and Keren House, both founder principals of The Partners). A certain R. Seymour gained his first yellow pencil for these music books whilst working as Gorham’s assistant in 1977, before turning to product design.

Mary Lewis apparently talks of one of Gorham’s meticulously hand rendered comps for a beer can design as one of the reasons she became a packaging designer. Aziz Cami held his work in such high esteem he awarded Gorham the D&AD president’s award, in 1993. (That’s three D&AD ex-presidents in two paragraphs, in case you’re counting).

Gorham’s style was all about the idea first, the idea, after that, the idea. Whilst some of his solutions now seem a little whimsical and retro, as London’s army of would-be Müller-Brockmanns play with tightly leaded Helvetica or juggle Bauhaus-inspired geometry, Gorham was from the in-between era. An era fuelled by the vernacular experiments of Pushpin in New York and retro typography that created a new language of illustrative type and illustration. For a decade or so it was everywhere and everything to graphic design.

Because of his unwillingness to stick to any one style he kept re-inventing himself, appropriating any graphic language he saw fit to carry his idea through. With the benefit of hindsight several of his designs stand as graphic year zeros from which all that follows must be judged. His Lion bar design, when it arrived on the chocolate counters of the mid-seventies represented a huge breakthrough for packaging. I remember buying one, aged thirteen, thinking, ‘how can this cost the same as a Mars bar when it looks so much more expensive?’

His design for a Marcel Proust slipcase and book covers, painstakingly researched from old bookplates, kicked off a whole host of letterspaced Baskerville caps imitations that continued for at least a decade. His poster for the English Riviera unfortunately encouraged a whole generation of designers to pretend that they actually were 1930’s poster artists.

In part his unwillingness to ‘stick to a style’ makes historical analysis more difficult - some of these approaches were more or less successful than others (or more or less ripped off), in varying degrees. I can’t actually assess this riviera poster any more because a legion of 80s copyists, in my eyes at least, rendered the original toothless. But there’s nothing new there.

Over the years many have mentioned Gorham’s lack of formal training (true), that he taught himself graphics mainly from books (true) and that he eventually put the books away to stop them influencing him (also true). He was described as ‘the quintessentially English’ designer and as ‘the graphic John Betjeman’, more likely to be influenced by a drawing on an old coffee tin than any passing trend or fad. Boil many graphic designers down to their true core and you will discover the rump of asymmetric modernism, happy to range left and specify Akzidenz until the cows come home but this was anathema to Gorham - ‘if someone asked me to create a poster with irrational, typographic eccentricity like that, I don’t think that I could do it’ he told me. His theory didn’t emanate from inter-war design doctrines, it was more likely to be influenced by a sign in a launderette or a green felt pin-board; the ordinary detritus of everyday life.

When he and I met, there was no hiding his distrust of modern graphics, its reliance on the computer and any inference that his way of working might be from another time.

‘I hate the idea of being old-fashioned, or new-fashioned’ he said, before asking ‘am I correct, that people now don’t solve graphic problems any more?’ in a slightly exasperated voice. In something of a sideswipe at the machines he produced a self promotional poster in the nineties which simply used a photo of the back of an envelope and a pencil. Under the envelope he wrote ‘my only gizmo’, under the pencil ‘and its mouse’. Much acclaimed by his contemporaries (Hegarty phoned, Fletcher wrote), the poster failed in its primary task, which was to get some work. He identifies this as the point when he stopped trying, then aged sixty-four.

At one point there was a sense with the ‘forgotten’ seventies heroes that their work would never be re-assessed, that graphic design’s turn back to modernism has been so marked that British whimsy has been wiped away. But the decorative revival seen recently in illustration has led to illustrator Alan Aldridge's re-assessment (and accompanying exhibition at the Design Museum), so perhaps a revival of Gorham’s approach could soon be upon us.

You get the feeling that his work needs to be collected somewhere, somehow, soon before a significant name of British graphic design simply fades away.

Beryl McAlhone (co-author of ‘Smile in the mind’) and James Beveridge (ex of The Partners) have been researching a book on Gorham’s work but are thus far unable to find a publisher. Please email info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk if you want to help.

The above piece is based on a conversation between Michael Johnson and John Gorham in 1999.

We’re doing a project at the moment with a company based on Windmill Street in London. The first few times you walk down the street nothing seems strange (maybe the phone boxes and street lamps are just a little too twee?). Maybe.

But it’s this sign that really gets us: for a production at the Lyric Theatre round the corner (dating from about 1990) for a production called ‘Burn This’ (so that’s a long time to keep a sign up).

It’s up on the side of the Lyric which is the last remains of a house built in 1766 by Dr William Hunter (an anatomist) as a home and partly as an anatomical theatre/museum.

What’s odd about the sign is that it’s completely burnt out (and of course looks fantastic). We think this is a result of a fire at the Windmill Theatre, but any info someone could send us would be much appreciated.The pics don’t do it justice but it says ‘Burn this should not be missed’.

At the end of last week some test barrels for our Glenfiddich project arrived.

We’ve been making some small and slightly dodgy sculptures out of spare polyboard, but this was our chance to collapse some real barrels and get to grips with how they’re actually made.

First of all you have to knock the ‘hoops’ off.

Then the top can come off. (By the way, the slats/staves are numbered so we can remember what order it all goes back together).

Here we’ve put it on its side so we can get the bottom hoops off.

Eventually it, er, falls apart. Look, no glue. It’s just held together by the hoops and the way the staves are cut to fit together.

The insides of the tops often tell you where the casks originate from. In this case from the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee. It surprises most people (it definitely surprised us) to find out that whisky manufacturers like Glenfiddich prefer their barrels second-hand (less ‘oaky’, or something like that). So they buy them from bourbon manufacturers after they’ve used them once (which can be for as little as three years).

Here are the slats, laid out.

And on their sides.

And then shot from the side.

We couldn’t stop ourselves trying out a few ideas about how we might use the staves together. Not sure what it is yet, but it looks great.

And there must be something we could do with these barrel hoops.

Next week: some first ideas, (we hope).

This is the fifth in a series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’re tracking the project on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here, the fourth was here.

In a taxi recently, driving into Philadelphia, we passed a T-Mobile shop that looked really awful. As in the picture below, because of the odd proportions of the logo, the ‘T’ ends up miles from ‘Mobile’.

And as a plonked piece of type, as in this example (from Holland), it doesn’t work too nicely either.

Now, we’re sure that no-one really likes this logo. Let’s face it, as a symbol for a global mobile phone company it’s not really delivering much. Sorry. But, as an exercise, more than anything, we thought we’d set ourselves a challenge.

The challenge was this: improve this donkey of a logo without changing the elements fundamentally. It’s too easy to just change the type or the symbol or the colours. Nope, not allowed. The challenge would be to make what’s there work a lot better.

So, looking at what they have...

...the ‘T’ has always looked divorced from the rest of the word. The spaces between the dots look optically wrong. The dots look odd, full stop (pardon the pun). The type looks poorly thought through. Does that dot at the end really work?

So, let’s start.

That weird dot spacing is, technically, correct (ie the dots are an equal space apart) but the optical effect of placing the ‘T’ there makes the spacing look optically too big.

Here we’ve tightened the spacing of the middle three dots, so they look equidistant, but aren’t. A bit better. Actually quite a lot better.

Next we’ve tightened up the letter spacing of ‘mobile’. Better. Still various issues though.

Here we’ve just made the square dots a bit smaller. There’s still some logic though...

..they’re spaced out like this, and the width of the dot matches the downstrokes better. Still room for improvement.

Those angles versus the square dots look odd to us. And the angled tops of the ascenders are just a hang over from the font’s original job as a body copy face.

How about a square dot as well, not a round one? Here’s what all those changes look like.

So here the angles are straightened throughout. Not bad actually. Trouble is that dot at the end still bugs us - the weight of it will always clash with the outside stroke of the ‘e’.

Let’s try it without the end dot.

That’s better. Maybe, if we’re feeling ambitious, a pink dot?

So, to summarise, we’ve gone from here...

...to here, in about ten steps. In about an hour.

Looks better to us. Tighter, more structured, but still logical. Obviously, pink and grey and Century condensed might not have been our starting point, but we’re a lot happier now. That Dutch fascia would look like this.

We enjoyed that. In fact we’re going to do more of these, in idle moments (if T -Mobile’s lawyers haven’t taken us to the cleaners in the meantime). If you have a suggestion for the next LoGoReDo, please email info[at]johnsonbanks[dot]co[dot]uk with your nomination.

Continuing our series tracking our Glenfiddich project, we’re waiting for the delivery of some actual barrels from the distillery. While we wait, we’ve been doing some experiments with humble bits of polyboard to see what we might be able to do with the slats of the barrels. Here are some of the experiments.

We’re expecting the barrels any minute, so we’ll be able to try this with the real thing pretty soon.

This is part of a running series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’ve agreed to ‘log’ the project’s progress on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here.

Designers, photographers and creatives often have a keen sense of right, wrong, ownership, theft and, increasingly, copyright.

But there are two significant problems with protecting your copyright. Firstly, you can't copyright an idea. Yes, you read that right, an idea is nothing, in the eyes of the law, the way the idea is done is everything. Secondly, creatives are notorious for borrowing ideas from other sources and re-working them into their own ideas. So when someone finds a possible appropriation, you are, in the eyes of the law, buggered, and your case will fall apart.

To give you an example of an idea that's hard to protect, consider this thought for an edible spoon. Neat idea isn’t it?

Now consider the edible spoons that followed it.

Now go to Google images and tap in ‘edible spoon’.

Whilst the first image may have been first to market, the second was sufficiently different in shape and decoration to not infringe. And, guess what, the world is full of edible spoons already – the idea is inherently unprotectable. (This came up as an example at a copyright seminar last week where I joined lawyer Margaret Briffa, Kjell Ekhorn from Non-Format and Paul Cohen from AMV BBDO).

The speakers revealed surprising facts almost from the word go. Cohen admitted that there could be an unwritten ad-man’s code, something like ‘steal what you like as long as it’s not from another ad’. Shocking though this was to hear, he was at least being honest about his industry’s tendency to borrow heavily from other sources. And we already know that ‘Balls’ may once have been a sketch on Letterman, that ‘Cog’ may have been inspired an art film, that Bravia’s rabbits may well have once been Kozyndan’s bunnies, and so on.

But, somewhat against type, Cohen proved to be eloquent in his analysis of the issues of ownership. In his previous life as a designer he had felt so disenfranchised when some book covers designed whilst freelance ‘influenced’ an entire ad campaign only months later, he developed his own side project where he re-worked famous logos into other, equally famous logos, to make a point.

Unsurprisingly he eventually received ‘cease and desist’ legal letters, but you get the feeling he got some of his anger out of his system. And interestingly, he’s now moved over to advertising himself, perhaps in the hope of producing more that is original and less that is familiar.

Kjell Ekhorn admitted that once Non-Format’s signature ‘styles’ reached boiling point, he and his partner were happy to change - “when we feel we’re in a crowded space, we just move on.” So both their butterflies/leaves/swirls style…

…and more recently the 'big/blocky typefaces' style…

…have been borrowed the world over, but he’s remarkably sanguine about this. Luckily, on several occasions large blue-chips have queued up for one or more of these maturing styles so they've been able to make the most of something, fiscally, before upping sticks.

Interestingly, he was quick to admit their own influences, such as their continued determination to use Mickey Mouse ears in as unusual a way as possible. Or their recent work for art-disco-indie-darlings The Chap which freely takes Jeff Koons’ Balloon dogs and remixes them with chocolate noses and cake decorations, or turns the dog into er, hedgehogs.

Just before Koons’ lawyers pick up the phone, remember, the idea of a balloon dog can’t be copyrighted, only the way you do it (and Koons of course is a famous appropriator too).

As for us, well I’m the first to admit that when we suggested clocks to the British Council, Tibor Kalman’s watches immediately ran through my mind.

And when I have to draw something simple, graphic and irrefutable I often wish I were Shigeo Fukuda (sadly mine never turn out anywhere as good as his).

But most of the time we’re searching for the new, not the me-too. Partly because it’s a lot more interesting, and partly because in an ever more litigious, trade-mark checking environment, the unusual stands a far better chance of being cleared rather than sinking into a copyright quagmire.

There are occasions when things are strikingly similar. This example cropped up in British design magazine Design Week only recently, where property development company Homerun unveiled an ‘h’ as a house logo, with more than a passing similarity to the one we designed for Shelter four years ago.

But, because the ‘h‘ is drawn differently, is a different colour and isn’t in the word, there’s not much we can do. Apart from smile to ourselves at this fantastic quote from the Homerun’s ‘creator’, James Pyott: ‘we explored lots of symbols, and by combining the letter with the product symbol came up with the h-house. It was one of those ‘eureka’ moments; that you always look for, but rarely ever happens’. Yes James, absolutely.

When so much work is easily viewed and copied on-line and in books, strange examples such this for the London borough of Tottenham will continue to happen. Some might describe it as the illegitimate offspring of Wolff Olins’ Unilever logo and our Think London logo, but we can’t really comment.

But there is a happy ending to all this. You can sue, if it’s close enough. These discount German bus-cards appeared recently, but the blur filter effect wasn’t enough to stop Non-Format realising that someone sneaky had simply scanned their record sleeve for Barry 7, done several years previously. And yes, they were compensated, substantially, by an embarrassed bus company.

It is possible to make a claim stick, just as long as the similarity is much more than just a passing one. But for the rest of us, a subtle re-draw, a change of colour and a change of context might be all that someone needs to borrow virtually anything that’s out there. Worried?

Michael Johnson was a panellist at an Own-it/D&AD intellectual property event last week. There’s more information and links to speakers here.

We get sent quite a lot of stuff nowadays, most of it dreadful. But this arrived last week and caused a few giggles. Sydney-based designer Chris Doyle has obviously done too many large identity projects recently - he decided to create a set of guidelines for himself as he began wondering ‘how my personal identity would be documented if it were considered in graphic design terms’.

So the image above is from a spread marked Full Colour Vertical_Private. The following 'key identity formats’ are, of course, Full Color_Vertical, Full Colour Seated_Casual and Full Colour Seated _Formal.

There’s a funny section about colour palette, then colour variations.

And the obligatory ‘clearing space’ section.

And ‘incorrect use’.

Doyle entered it into an Australian design competition recently, and included himself in the entry, so stood alongside the work, with his own number and rationale pinned to his back. Funny.

His day job is as a senior design at Moon Group in Sydney.

This week sees the publication of a useful new book by Rockport on identity design, by Sean Adams of LA-based design agency Adams Morioka. Albeit rather grandly titled ‘Masters of design, Logos and Identity’, Adams has succesfully selected about 30 designers from across the world, and devotes a series of spreads to each designer, showcasing recent work and analysing the way they work.

Some of the designers included with in-depth studies are Philipppe Apeloig, Margo Chase and Steff Geissbuhler, with useful shorter sections devoted to designers such as Michael Bierut and Vince Frost. There’s also a good logo round-up at the back.

Johnson banks’s creative director Michael Johnson is featured as one of the thirty, and we’ve reprinted below excerpts from an interview that formed the basis of the text.

What is your overall philosophy about logos and identity?

Every time I think that I’ve fixed my view about how an identity should look, feel or communicate, a new project will come along and I’ll realize that having no fixed modus operandi makes life so much more interesting.

What do you think is more successful, wordmarks or symbols?

I think it was Bob Gill who said that ‘boring words need interesting graphics’, and vice versa. So, whilst, my default setting is probably drawn towards wordmarks, I know deep down that sometimes a symbol can be fantastically useful (usually when the words of an organization don’t quite communicate what they should).

I do think that as identities have to communicate so quickly, taking up valuable ‘real estate’ of an identity with a symbol has to be carefully considered – ie only a certain amount of space can be allocated to logos in line-ups or on websites, so taking up half the space with a symbol sometimes feels wrong.

Should a logo be simple or  complex, monochromatic or polychromatic, 3 dimensional or flat,  moveable or static?

Personally, I’ve been fascinated for years in identities that can change, and adapt to their surroundings. I’m thoroughly bored of the ‘logo that goes in the corner’ syndrome and will do almost anything in my power to avoid this.

Based on your philosophy, what are the characteristics of  identities that fail?

Well logos that immediately date a company are wrong, unless they’re happy to be immediately dated. As I’ve hinted, identities that are overly static and rigid strike me as inappropriate in the multi-media environment we now live in. The schemes that are overly policed by in-house logo-cops are such a drag to work on for other design consultants – before we became logo designers we had to earn our spurs applying other people’s schemes and that was quite a salutary experience. The trick is to make people want to get involved in a project, not just grin and bear it to pay the mortgage.

Multiple technologies and media have changed the venues we use to talk with the audience. Has that affected the way you design identities?

The simple answer is yes – the advent of tele-visual needs, animation and the web has meant we’re constantly thinking about how an idea will work in a moving or animated form (our BFI work started as an animation, then became a logo). The more complex answer is that the changing technology has supplied the irrefutable reasons for flexibility that we’ve always desired – before, flexible, changeable identity schemes were just limited to TV companies. Now, everyone’s interested in schemes that can adapt to their surroundings and appear less monolithic than before. I’m much happier now than I was – before people just seemed to think I was nuts when I argued for logos that could change.

What are the top 5 rules for you on logo design?

I’m really, really tempted to say there are none. We don’t walk around the studio saying ‘ah yes, nice idea but what about the small-use black and white version’. We don’t say ‘the one colour version is paramount’. We don’t limit our work to vector programs. For a while there I think there was an implicit rule that our solutions should be reductionist, simple ideas (and many of them are, it’s true). Trouble is as soon as I say ‘that’s a rule’ I know we’ll go off and do something really complicated, almost to prove that the rule was a waste of time. Our Think London logo should have been a simple mark but ended up being made up of 44 separate symbols…

What advice would you give to young designers about making successful logo and id systems?

To be honest, in England at least, very few students seem to be interested. This strikes me as a huge mistake. Their folios are crammed with ambient advertising, or viral on-line clips, or posters for film seasons, or personal projects. But they spend practically no time art college thinking about identity, designing them, practicing them…  So they get to me and I virtually have to teach identity from the ground up. But whilst the brochures or websites or whatever all change, the one thing that remains constant is organisations’ need to identify themselves in unique and interesting ways. In other words, identity design isn’t going away. If anything, if our experience is anything to go by, it’s getting more and more important. So I’d study all of it, all of the time, then you’re in a position to practice it sooner or later.

Since the last time we posted about this project, we’ve been looking harder at the brief, looking harder at what others have done with barrels, and questioning the client a bit about why they came to us.

It turns out that Glenfiddich were really interested in our fascination with time, and the fact that we have a whole whole section of our website devoted to it.

Also, the fact that we’d done some installation/ wooden/timepiece based work (like this project) was useful. (Phew, knew that clock project would come in handy one day).

The reason why time is such a big thing to them is that Glenfiddich are really trying hard to explain to people just how long their whisky spends in the barrels (up to 30 years), as opposed to dodgier whiskys and bourbons that can barreled for as little as 3 years.

Their recent advertising campaign (below) is picking up on this with an ‘every year counts’ theme. Not mind-blowing, but we can see what they’re getting at.

Meanwhile. our travels on the interweb continue to dig up some great stuff as regards ‘901 things you can do with a barrel’. Staircases and furniture anyone?

Or just generally chopping them up to make interesting shapes and sculptures.

There’s a great tradition of painted barrels in Japan as well, which we’ve only just discovered.

The next task is to work out how to take this ‘time’ theme and apply it onto (or into) the barrels, somehow.

This is part of a running series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’ve agreed to ‘log’ the project’s progress on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here.

When D&AD rang and explained their idea for a little exhibition to celebrate 45 years of D&AD, our first reaction was ‘well, that's going to look awful’.

The idea was to have two copies of each annual in a case, and ask the president from each year to write about their favourite project of the year with one of the annuals open at that page.

As it turns out we were completely wrong and it’s actually a fascinating run through four and half decades of advertising and design. We’ve reproduced a few of them below, with their captions, but it’s definitely worth going to see it for yourselves.

Larry Barker 2000

I wasn’t going to pick this.
I was going to be a bit more ‘street’ - see if there wasn’t something we’d all forgotten in the ‘Interactive’ section.
Possibly something obscure from ‘Packaging’.
But this isn’t about the obscure and forgettable, is it?
I remember ‘Surfer’.
I remember when it arrived, hot from the editors.
I remember the unholy scramble to get a look.
I remember how long it took to get my jaw off the floor.
How the soundtrack made your speakers rattle.
The astonishing casting.
I remember the ungracious pooh-pooh-ing it received from some quarters.
Mainly from people who couldn’t hope to do anything half as good.
I also remember the story about the account man who said,
‘Do we really need the horses?’
So, here’s to talent, here’s to bravura, here’s to sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s to waiting.

Mike Dempsey 1997

A decade or so is just about the right time to reassess work. One can see it in the context of the period and the prevailing influences. For me Mark Farrow’s music packaging for Deconstruction stands up beautifully. I haven’t got a clue as to what is behind the idea, but the design is a delight to behold.

Martin Lambie-Nairn 1991

The first twenty five percent of the 1991 annual features page after page of red rectangles surrounding white type.  Having said just that, I expect you’ve already guessed which campaign I am referring to. Yep, The Economist.

1991 seems to have been the year when this wonderfully elegant and powerful campaign swept the board, and rightly so. Not only that, but seventeen years later the same format continues to entertain, inspire and no doubt sell countless copies of The Economist.

This one campaign has had more influence on me, and the way I try to solve design problems, than any other piece of work. For me it contains all the virtues of great design and advertising; one simple idea continually refreshed and expressed in dozens of ways, consistently holding to the basic idea with dogged confidence, and demonstrating the very highest standard of wit, writing and art direction.

May this campaign run forever.

Allen Thomas 1985

My favourite item in the annual didn’t actually win a prize. It was for Volvo and showed David Abbot lying under a car suspended from on high. The headline read, ‘If the welding isn’t strong enough, the car will fall on the writer’. This was followed by some long copy which was a pleasure to read. It was part of an outstanding campaign which made this somewhat worthy brand almost sexy. No mean feat.

Tony Brignull 1983

My choice for the outstanding item in the 1983 D&AD annual is easy: it's the one all juries voted for that year, the Araldite poster, ‘It also sticks handles to teapots’. You probably know it as the one where they glued a car to a super site in the Cromwell Road. Some days a man sat nonchalantly reading beneath it. News programmes discussed it. Magazines showed it. People actually went to see it. It rightly won the only Black pencil awarded that year. Its triumph lay not merely in a sudden, phenomenal and dangerous creative leap (will it stay up?) but in the fact that it took demonstration, until then the exclusive property of television, and moved it outdoors. It added a new dimension both physically and aesthetically to a medium, which was considered static and peripheral. In a single stroke it enlivened a brand, the poster industry and all who saw it.

Alan Parker 1976

It was pleasantly surprising to revisit the work of over thirty years ago since much in this annual looks modern and has dated little (well, apart from my picture at the front, which makes me look about eleven years of age.) I avoided opening a page at one of my own commercials and avoided even more those of Ridley Scott. I then came upon a spread of work by the late John Gorham. John was one of the great graphic artists of the time, working alone; he was a humble genius whose purist quintessentially English eye and immaculate craftsmanship influenced his peers and a generation of designers that followed.

David Abbott 1975

It wasn’t exactly a boom year; the economy was flat and the 1975 annual reflected the general lack of confidence.The Hovis campaign, however, raised our spirits with its beauty and calm assurance. It is still remembered to this day and is included in all those ‘Favourite Ads’compilations. The image of the young lad pushing his bike up the cobbled hill is unforgettable. In the 1975 annual it won a Yellow Pencil for the most outstanding film photography. It should have been a Black.

The Pencil Exhibition (45 years of creativity from the D&AD Annuals) is on until the 23rd September at the Royal College of Art, London

Architects dream of their first building going up. Product designers: their first range going on-sale in the Apple store. Graphic designers? Well, perhaps designing a famous symbol, or pack, or poster. Or winning their most treasured award. But another recurring dream is the one where someone writes a bestselling book about their work.

It’s understandable, in a way – if you’ve spent 20 years honing your skills that often appear in print, a book to record it all seems fairly logical. And for decades now there’s been quite a bit of precedent; Paul Rand produced several books on his design approach and theories in his own lifetime; Fletcher Forbes Gill started their pu