Category Archives: Graphics

Tomorrow’s Chip Paper

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Forgive the dodgy camera phone photo, it was dark. That there, covered in muck and beer, lying face down on the floor of a pub, just by the door to the toilets, is a flyer I designed a few months ago.

I remember aligning the type on that flyer. Choosing the colours. Discussing what it needed to do and say. I remember discussing sizes, print costs, who to use and where to put them. I remember the phone call from the client, Rich, when he was trying to find the printers in order to collect his box of pristine flyers.

***

Last year I helped set up and run an event for a regular client. Each attendee was given a welcome pack that I had previously designed, containing agendas, information sheets, publicity materials and such like. I had collected it all myself from the printer just a day before the event and had spent the evening putting them together, making sure every one was complete and in order. Among the pack contents was an information flyer I had designed a few weeks before. Printed in full colour, they had a couple of specifically positioned folds that had caused a bit of head-scratching at the printers when trying to get everything aligned correctly.

On the morning of the event, having already set out the chairs and fathomed how to wire up an unfamiliar PA system, my one last job was to prepare the projector. With it sat on a small table suitably positioned for maximum visibility, I was irritated by the minor wobble caused by an uneven floor. Although the wobble was slight, it was enough to send the projected image a good six inches off the screen when unsettled.

While scanning around for a quick solution I was politely interrupted by one of the guests who had arrived early and had been quietly sitting in the room, watching me work. She kindly delved into her pristine and previously unopened welcome pack, pulled out her copy of my clever, full-colour two-fold flyer, opened it out without a glance, folded it tightly into a wedge and handed it to me with a smile.

“Oh, thank you.” I replied cheerfully, as I forced it between the table leg and the floor.

My Favourite Movie Title Sequence

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PanicRoom01

In the ten years since the release of David Fincher’s Panic Room I’ve yet to see another movie title sequence I adore quite so much.

My design studies covered film title sequences, so I was intimately familiar with Kyle Cooper’s masterpiece for Fincher’s earlier movie, Se7en. My love of Fincher was then solidified when the magnificent Fight Club was released, itself headed up by an epic opening sequence. So as I sat in the cinema beside a fellow graphic design student, we had high hopes that Panic Room’s titles were going to be something special. It didn’t disappoint.*

A decade on, floating typography in live action 3D space is a commonly used device, but I’d never seen it before Panic Room, and I’ve never seen it done so well since.

Daily life on the streets of Manhattan seems to go by oblivious, while overhead huge words hang motionless in mid air. The scale, the compositions, the perspective all combine to create something inexplicably threatening.

Such is the seamless integration with the CGI type into the environment, you wonder what the people down below think about it. Have they noticed what hangs overhead? Do they know it’s there? Are they just ignoring it? Have they become used to it? Why do they not stare up in amazement, or run in fear?

But life just goes on, everyone seemingly oblivious to something really rather sinister. We can see it, but nobody else can. That’s the beauty. It’s a simple device; calm, quiet and delivered with little drama, yet it creates a tension that sets the scene for the thriller that follows.

The viewer is initially put in a position somewhat detached from the world, and we feel we want to shout down to the people on the streets, to warn them, make them look up, to make them aware of the terrifying thing going on. But we can’t. We’re powerless.

And then we find ourselves down at street level, looking up as the words continue to hang. Where once we were detached, looking down from a unique perspective, we’re now down in there with everyone else, the threat now above us.

With no faces, no action, with nothing more than a few bits of type, some steady shots of everyday Manhattan and some suitably foreboding music, the scene is set for the entire movie. Before any dialogue takes place, before any characters are introduced, before we know anything at all, we’re put on edge. Absolutely fantastic. Give it a watch.

*I actually remember my friend whispering an astonished “f-kin hell”.

Designing for Social Causes: The ‘Healthy Sausage Sizzles Less’ Paradox

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That famous advertising mantra “sell the sizzle, not the sausage” brings attention to the fact that so much consumer spending is governed by our hearts rather than our heads. The art of skilful advertising, branding and marketing (different disciplines of the same game in my view) is to locate and exploit that very specific point where the inherent qualities of a product or service intersect a basic irrational human desire.

Red Bull is my favourite example of sausage playing distant second fiddle to sizzle. Their logo doesn’t represent a beverage. It represents the highest, the strongest, the fastest, the most daring. It’s base jumping, rock climbing, snowboarding. Formula 1, number one, win win win. Look at their homepage and see how long it takes to locate a reference to the actual drink on what appears to be primarily a sports news website. Yes, drowsy shift workers may well justify that fizzy caffeine hit as a rational purchase, but it’s on the shelves because Red Bull is in the business of selling action, and business is good.

Even tediously rational products are sold in the same way. The brochures for gas combi boilers come stuffed with images of healthy family lifestyles in designer houses we all aspire to inhabit. That ubiquitous mundanity the headache tablet isn’t a mix of chemicals designed to reduce fever or inflammation in humans; it’s targeted pain relief that heads straight to the heart of the problem with knowing, pinpoint precision. Toilet roll isn’t absorbent paper designed for the removal of post defecation faecal matter; it’s quilted decadent luxury or the soft fur of a faithful, playful puppy. Throughout my entire youth I assumed sanitary towels were something to do with rollerblading.

The task is simple. Find the easy sell. Turn the inherent qualities of your client into a sizzle that’ll be an easy sell. Forget the mashed eyeballs, minced testicles and artery clogging cholesterol of a sausage the head knows it should avoid. Make the heart aware of the sizzle instead and watch the world chow down on the pig giblet.

It’s all so easy. Appealing to the heart is easy. Do you know why? Because the heart is an idiot. Listening to our hearts is why people stay in abusive relationships. Why we continue to piss away the resources we rely on as a species. It’s why our homes were transformed from necessities to commodities and now have monetary values far in excess of what they’re actually worth. It’s why we continue to spend money on goods we don’t need despite facing ever increasing levels of forced austerity.

Yes, the heart is an idiot easily swayed. Deeply ingrained human desires are easy to exploit, they’re the easy pickings on which the capitalist system is hinged. But the head is something altogether different. The head is sensible. The head is cynical, logical, analytical, and this is where the paradox lies. It can be much, much harder to convince people of the worth of something genuinely, measurably, quantifiably worthwhile than it is to convince them there’s worth in something genuinely, measurably, quantifiably worthless.

The fact that heart rules head is why designing for the social sector is so much harder than it is for the commercial sector, despite seeming on the surface to be a far simpler task.

We tend to buy irrationally yet give rationally*. When we give, we want assurances that our money or our support will be used wisely. We’re cynical about where our charitable donations go and we like to hold the recipients to account, while the private corporations to which we give far more get to behave how they like. The corporate world has half the battle won before it starts because we all want to believe our selfish, frivolous spending has some value, so we disregard evidence to the contrary and convince ourselves it does. But we need to know our philanthropic endeavour has some value, and feel wronged if the evidence shows that it doesn’t.

Which is where I get to the key point of this post. It can be very easy to market your way out of a sales problem, but it’s impossible to market your way out of a social problem.

Over the past year or so in my efforts to spend more time designing for social cause clients than for purely commercial ones, I’ve ended up talking myself out of what should have been straightforward design jobs and into more complex ones well beyond my comfort zone. I’ve found myself frequently offering input that perhaps moves beyond the traditionally recognised realm of the designer. People approach me when they want design, that’s the service they expect. But providing a mere service is pointless without the promise of a result, and for the money they pay me a client deserves a result.

A brand is the clothing an organisation wears. Our favourite high street brands look great in their fancy clothes, but stripped naked they’re typically grotesque cynical monsters of ugly exploitation and devious dealings. The capitalist system rewards such behaviour, but the social and charitable sector isn’t so lucky. It also needs to look good naked.

What all designers working in this area should bear in mind is that the traditional smoke and mirrors approach has no place. There has to be real substance behind the work we do for such clients, otherwise we might as well not do anything. We need to dig deeper in order to do our jobs because the clothes we provide simply can not cover up unsightly things like they so often can in the corporate world.

The corporate world is built on polishing turds. The social and charitable sector is built on shitting gold. That is a key difference designers must recognise. Those who don’t, those happy to do the beautification work, go through the motions, take the money and run aren’t doing their job properly. Design is creative problem solving, and beautification alone can’t solve many problems in this sector.

The client may already look fantastic naked, they may well just need the clothes. If that’s the case then great, we designers can do what we’re most comfortable doing. But the onus is on us to first ensure that is the case; to make sure that we have that starting point. Otherwise we’re just taking money from a social cause and offering nothing in return, which is parasitic and immoral. I see it often and it really boils my piss.

*Last week I had to think about the merits of donating a fiver to a museum’s voluntary donation bin, then just an hour later I blew a tenner on a Chinese restaurant’s lunch menu without a second thought. Though I recall enjoying it I can’t remember now what that meal tasted like, yet I can remember all kinds of stuff I saw at the museums, from the posturing of rival crabs to the hollow bones of the pterosaur skeleton, to the beautifully engineered directional thrusters of space craft to the regimented discipline of ants collecting leaves for their nest. I learnt about global shipping, the exploitation of cotton pickers in Uzbekistan, took a virtual ride on a long dismantled railway, saw actual contents raised from the actual wreck of the actual Titanic. Many hours perusing incomprehensibly ancient artefacts, learning about the wonders of nature and the bafflingly complex technology of man was worth half as much to my logical head as a hastily prepared and consumed set meal was to my stupid heart. Indulgent, momentary and fleeting pleasure won out over countless hours of mind expansion. Idiot.

This shouldn’t bother me

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but it does.

The Design Museum is shortly to host a retrospective of one of my design heroes – Kenneth Grange. Now on sale in their shop is this book. You’ll see the cover features three examples of his work. Glasses, pen, train.

A Hornby toy train. Must. Resist. Hulk. Style. Rampage.

I know, you can’t go and photograph that image at full scale today as none of them wear that livery anymore, which I admit is the definitive livery, the way 125s should look. The only way that matters. That’s exactly why, for my piece on the 125 a while ago, I had to draw my own.

Come on folks, licence a good image of what you want. I bet the DRU collection features scale livery drawings from the time – they would have been a sublime choice. What about Pentagram’s archives? Or create your own images. Or design around the issue. Or something else. Don’t just stick a toy on there.

Most people won’t care for a moment, I know. But for a book about one of the UK’s most successful and respected industrial designers and co founder of probably the world’s most famous multi-disciplinary design agency, that cover is a depressingly lazy bit of graphic design. It deserves better.

I’m buying it of course. I’ll just have to design my own dust jacket.

Cigarette warnings

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A lot of my posts recently seem to follow on from others. Sorry about that. This one follows on from an earlier piece about the enforced eradication of cigarette branding.

My attention was turned back on to the subject this morning following a bit of clicking around online. I happened across Ricky Trickartt’s interesting and pretty cool experimentation, which itself followed on from the earlier efforts of Build.

They’re both interesting, but essentially flawed because despite the best efforts of the designers, they still look pretty cool. Personally I think the last person in the world qualified to design an unappealing cigarette pack is an established and talented designer. The best person for the job must surely be an HR professional; finer purveyors of clipart, comic sans and Microsoft Publisher I’m yet to meet.

Anyway, in his accompanying blog, Trickartt questions the effectiveness of the health warnings found on fag packets:

“I’m sure it could be argued that smokers are becoming desensitised to the messages present on current cigarette packaging, but there’s not really any other consistent way of getting the message across. To people who don’t smoke or don’t spend a lot of time around cigarette packaging, though, the images and messages can seem shocking, and may act as a deterrant.”

I wonder if perhaps there is actually another consistent way of getting the message across. Either way, before I have a try myself I’d like to make known my own feelings on cigarettes in the hope that it might avoid my smoking readership coming over to punch me in my smug, self satisfied face.

As I said in my earlier post, despite my personal hatred of smoking, I do think smokers have been outcast enough now. If people want to smoke then let them, I don’t care. Why would I? With the smoking ban as it currently stands, it’s rare I ever even notice a cigarette, let alone smell one. In the last year I can only remember a single occasion where I had to deal with cigarette smoke, which makes me think that the worst aspect of tobacco smoke – passive smoking – has been mostly eradicated. Smokers pay horrendous tax on their chosen vice too which, let’s be honest, would only be sought elsewhere if they all quit.

So though this post may seem like yet another cheap stab at smokers, it really isn’t meant to be. I actually approach this from a certain level of personal experience. I’ve never smoked, but I have been on the receiving end of self righteous repetition for doing something deemed socially unacceptable. I used to drive a Land Rover you see, and there are few things this side of puppy stabbing that attract such holier than thou vitriol from an ignorant general public. So I know what it’s like to live through that same kind of blind criticism on a daily basis. I know what it’s like to be seen as evil, ignorant and stupid, to be treat as an outcast and an acceptable target of hate by those self appointed judges of virtue, those who are generally unaffected in all ways except the brief and tragically needed spike in their own sense of superiority and self worth.

So please, don’t take this post as smoker-bashing. I’m genuinely interested in what sort of thing might act as a good deterrent. Finding a good deterrent has got to be a good thing, right? Even if it offends? So, onward.

My first thought is that existing messages are a bit irrelevant. I mean, smoking kills? Smokers die younger? Yeah, we know. It gives you cancer and that. We’ve know that for years. So does everything else we consume, don’t consume, watch, don’t watch, do or don’t do. We live in a world where, if the media is to be believed, the only thing not carcinogenic is reading about things that are irrelevant to us and then getting offended by or worrying about them. We know threats of death and cancer don’t work – any health related threat is a bit of a lost cause. We don’t as a species seem to care much about things like that. Driving is one of the most dangerous things we humans do after all, yet we indulge on a daily basis. We accept risk and danger, some of us even seek it – it’s part of what we are. Must think of something better to focus on then.

What if we focus on a more immediate issue? Death to most of us seems a long way off but self esteem is right here, right now. It’s also a very delicate thing, far more open to manipulation than our sense of mortality. Perhaps we could point out how disgusting the smoker smells?

It’s a valid point, but it just sounds like non-smoker whining, which is never going to work. Smokers hear that already and choose not to care. Perhaps we could be more offensive then? Less whiney, more brutal?

No. There’s no faster way to lose your audience than by mindlessly insulting them. I’m not particularly happy with the reliance on insults anyway to be honest. We’re dealing with addiction here and insults aren’t going to be productive. We’re looking to provide incentives to quit, not to kick someone while they’re down. Carrots work better than sticks. Perhaps we need to dig further, really tug at the deeper psychological issues?

Hmm. I suppose I quite like the power of that. Surely it must hit a nerve with anyone who started smoking when they were young, when they bowed to peer pressure and took their first drags to fit in with the cool kids. The problem with this though is one of contradiction. The smoker is being attacked for being weak, easily led and conformist by an overbearing establishment trying to get them to conform to its will. Bit of a paradox, really. Still a little bit insulting, too.

So we’re looking for something hard hitting and eye opening, not focussed on health issues, and it can’t be offensive. It’s tricky stuff this.

Of course the use of imagery is a fairly recent and more hard hitting approach.

 

The application of such graphics has been a requirement here since 2009 and it’s all good stuff, but it must really suffer from desensitisation. Think about it; cinema audiences of today will sit through video nasties like Saw 12 or Hostel 6, happily devouring buckets of sugared popcorn and cookie dough Haagen Daaz, watching as innocent people are forced to eat their own eyeballs and have their legs indulgently wound through a mangle by a preposterous maniac, all in glorious HD and 3D.

Eight year olds spend their evenings chainsawing hookers to death and throwing grenades at everything in sight in Grand Theft Auto, and the charmless slapstick innocence of You’ve Been Framed long since gave way to decapitation compilations on Youtube.  Our sense of decency is so out of whack that if anything is to even register as entertainment these days, it needs to be pretty extreme. Let’s be honest, a drunk fat auntie tumbling off an inadequate garden swing to the commentary of Harry Hill just doesn’t cut it as entertainment anymore when Tubgirl, Goatsee and 2 Girls 1 Cup are a mere click away. I’m not making those hyperlinks.

Big Brother (the TV one) was once an interesting study of human emotion, of group psychology. It was a relatively calm affair focussed on normal people discussing normal affairs in an abnormal situation, a study of how they dealt with isolation. When the experiment was repeated in series two we were immediately bored, and now if reality TV is to enjoy any ratings it has to feature manic depressive celebrities suspended by bungee cord over a vat of boiling piss, gnawing the genitals off a live kangaroo in a glass case full of vomit covered scorpions. This is 2011 – we’re alright with gore and violence. We expect it. If you want to shock us you’re going to have to try harder than a few pictures of smokey lung.

There is of course another overriding problem at play here. Pretty much anything you will put on a cigarette packet will come across as patronising. Every smoker knows the risks involved – it’s not an issue of lacking education. We all know smoking is bad and no harping on about it is going to make a difference. If someone smokes they do so knowingly, and no amount of information on the pack is bringing anything to the table. So it comes across as patronising crap, and being patronising is guaranteed to achieve nothing but the solidification of the mindset it’s trying to change.

It’s powerful then, being patronising – you’ve got to admit that. So perhaps we can turn it on its head and use it to our advantage? Worth bearing in mind.

What else? Money talks. Nobody likes waving goodbye to money, least of all in the form of taxation. Everybody hates The Man too don’t they – few things irritate the British more than the state telling us what to do for our own good. Which is exactly what we’re doing here really isn’t it. So again, what if we turn that on its head and use it to our advantage? What if we appeal to the smoking public’s famous belligerence, but from a different point of view? Might reverse psychology work?

Hmm, that looks a bit like a badge of honour. Maybe we need to drive the point home a bit more.

Bit wordy though, and lacking in punch. I’m a minimalist, so let’s see if we can cut the word count and increase the volume. Let’s add a bit of smugness too.

Are we getting anywhere? Perhaps if I add a picture of David Cameron’s stupid smug smiling millionaire face that’s got to help?

If bringing attention to the constant stench or lungs full of poisonous tar is failing to get the message across, maybe a picture of a smug millionaire gloating patronisingly about the outrageous amount of tax smokers voluntarily pay for those delightful privileges will provide a bit more of an incentive to quit.

Thanks to Carnavalet and Andy Bullock for making their pictures available for reproduction under creative commons licenses.

The Don Valley

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For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the Don Valley. I love the sheer variety of sights you see along its banks as it transforms steadily from rural trickle to past industrial power source. I’ve tracked it many times, having spent many a sunny evening after school following – as faithfully as possible – its meandering route on my bike. Tree and birdsong gives way to brick wall and traffic roar; goarse bush to barbed wire; gravel to broken glass, as the industry once so reliant on the Don’s fast flow gradually begins to cling tightly to its banks. For the inquisitive inner city adventurer, the snicketts and ginels that make up the route offer an alternative and fresh view of previously familiar areas. There’s a lot of activity down that there valley too, and when I see the work of the many projects that are slowly bringing life back to its long ignored banks, I’m left with a sense that the river will once again return as a focal point of the city.

Well I’m a graphic designer, and like 99% of graphic designers I’m inflicted with a helpless adoration of Harry Beck’s magnificent London tube map. And after a recent trip down the Don (armed with the camera that took the above shot) I was inspired to produce my own map of the valley - as a homage to Beck – showing its many attractions and transport links (click for full version on Flickr):

Don Valley Map

I should point out that for the moment this map is half reality and half semi-fantasy. I have taken the liberty of assuming that:

  • Those of the Don Valley Railway project have succeeded in their marvellous plans to return trains to the line between Deepcar and Nunnery Square (artistic licence sees my line terminate further downstream at Rotherham) and to build gondola cable cars to take people up the hill to the Ski Village.
  • The Upper Don Walk is complete, linking the Five Wiers Walk from Meadowhall with the Transpennine Trail at Oughtibridge, thus providing an unbroken traffic-free pedestrian and cycle route along the entire valley.
  • Steve Peat’s mountain bike skills loop is complete, in its place alongside the Ski Village on Parkwood springs

These are all projects that exist, and at various stages of their development. I’ve also added in a couple of my own suggestions for additional projects:

  • Turning the empty showroom and a couple of arches at the Wicker into a small transport museum, involving youth groups to get involved in the restoration of clapped out old british buses, cars, taxis and the like.
  • Running regular pleasure-cruises down the canal from the currently woefully underused and isolated Victoria Quays all the way downstream to the ever-popular Magna, incorporating multi-lingual commentaries on the industrial heritage of Sheffield as they navigate the route.
  • Linking in the above projects with a redeveloped Victoria Station atop the Wicker Arches, with elevator service down to street level.

Personally I’d also love to see Hollywood style lettering wobbling across the hillside of PARKWOOD too, though that might just be me. But the basic network is already in there. Many of the projects are underway, the ideas set and the foundations in place, and wonderful people up and down the valley are beavering away to make their own little bits happen.

Sheffield is so unique in its geography, and the Don Valley offers so much scope for a fantastic series of leisure and tourist activities. The city already accommodates rock climbers, skaters, cyclists, walkers, paddlers, anglers and skiers. Get the canals and the railways running again and see how it could all come together. When I travel down the Don Valley, it’s easy to see beyond the rapidly disappearing dereliction and vandalism and be filled with enthusiastic visions of its potential.

So I decided to design the map linking all these things together, with the useful inclusion of the tram route. In proper Beck tradition the design prioritises diagram clarity over geographical accuracy, but it gives a good idea of what goes off down the valley and how you’d navigate your way around the various attractions. The river takes the correct side of the various routes and stops, and the lines follow faithful courses relative to each other. I should perhaps revisit the river’s course around Tinsley, and get hold of the proper font really but still, looks cool eh.

I genuinely and enthusiastically hope that one day, visitors to the newly built attractions in this fascinating city will carry such a map in their pocket.

Grids, Modularity and the Germans

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Lego is a wonderful aid in developing the creativity of a young mind. With a box of bricks of various sizes, the imagination of every child can be brought to colourful and boxy life with just a few well placed snaps and clicks. It can also be responsible for instilling in one a strong sense of order and an understanding and love of the grid.

It is a most pleasing construction material for it works on a very simple, inflexible grid. As we all know, each block is three plates high and block sizes are counted in studs. The brick on the right is - in official Lego language - a 2×2 block, but more casually known as a ‘fourer’. As the image shows, a fourer can be matched using four ‘oners’, or if you were feeling less efficient, twelve ‘flat oners’. These are the units of measurement forming the grid that will run through the entire structure of any Lego creation.

As such, it’s a satisfying thing to work with. It leaves no room for error, gives no cause for bodging. If you conform to the grid you can be satisfied that things will work out. If the bridge you’re building is supported at one end by a column eight bricks high, you know at the other end you will be using another eight brick column. There will be no need for filling in small gaps, chopping a brick in half or shaving away edges to get things to fit. As long as you’ve done your counting right everything will click together and work. Lovely.

Designing pixel art is a very similar process. In fact the connection between pixel art and Denmark’s finest is one frequently made, as a bit of googling uncovers. It can be very satisfying to work with such a strictly gridded canvas. With a careful bit of judgement, working successfully within the confines of a very rigid grid can be a satisfying experience.

Of the many fonts I’ve had to create and build, the easiest was the smallest. Designed to be used as the body text for a title on the Nintendo DS (a console with a screen area of 256×192 pixels which may be put into context by me saying the column of text you’re currenty reading is 420 pixels wide) it was required to be as small as could be legible. This dictated that each character must be no bigger than 5×5 pixels square, and the tracking be set at a constant 1 pixel. At such small size, working to such a rigid grid, there isn’t really any way to go wrong.

So although working to such restrictive dimensions will never be the most creatively rewarding of tasks, you can assume that – so long as you don’t do anything stupid – the result will be spot on.

After one has worked on a few jobs at pixel level, with other restrictions such as 16-colour pallets and alias-free 1-bit alphas, it can be quite daunting to return to the high-res, high-def world. With no restrictions it can be incredibly hard to know where to start. Those rare times when a designer is given free reign, an open brief, a blank canvas and an unlimited budget can, after the initial excitement, be the most challenging projects of their career.

The line separating designer and artist is pretty blurred and frequently crossed, the two sharing much in common. Possibly the most obvious distinction one can make between the pair is that former will always be required to work within guidelines, while the latter will most often not. Grids, restrictions and guidelines are the foundations of design, and working successfully within them is a real skill. As Erik Spiekermann says:

“Good designers like guidelines, bad designers feel restricted by them“.

The designer’s grid is, unlike budget, licensing or print issues, a self-imposed restriction. It brings order and structure to a design, an invisible layer underneath the graphics which holds the layout together. It serves as a safety net, a guide which, when adhered to, can offer logic and clarity. Brave, clever or foolish is the designer who works without a grid, as is the architect who builds a house with no foundations.

Logic and clarity, forethought and planning are the basis of much graphic design. To quote Erik Spiekermann again:

“I take it apart, look at the elements, oil them, grease them, clean them, put them back together again and it always works. It’s only graphic design [...] The details are wrong and the whole thing falls apart.”

As when building a Lego house, if we are clever and methodical with our building blocks, the resulting creation will be a success.

In the first paragraph I claimed that Lego can ‘instill in one a strong sense of order and an understanding and love of the grid’. This might have appeared a little random and in need of justification, so I will expand. I spent many years playing with Lego as a youngster, and attribute it to my adult expectation that the world should conform to logic and structure. I can never understand why, for instance, builders spend so much time bodging. Why is the lintel above our fireplace in the living room not level? The same amount of bricks support it on each side and they stand on a level floor, so what’s gone wrong? Why has the builder had to bodge it straight? There should be no need in the world for bodging, gap filling, level checking, expanding foam and making do. If you plan correctly from the start, surely things should work out right?

It’s no surprise that England’s answer to Lego was Meccano – that collection of nuts, bolts and plates so ripe for bending and bodging. It’s wonderful stuff, great fun and no doubt the childhood memory of many a world-class engineer, but personally I was always more drawn to the accuracy of Danish plastic. Perhaps it’s why I have always opposed that very British way of working – the belief that we can wing it, the attitude that says “it’ll be fine“.

It rarely is fine. It’s why everything made here falls apart. We’re great at design – among the most creative, innovative nations in the world – but when it comes to making our ideas reality, they fall apart. We approach everything with the assumption that bridges don’t need to be crossed until we come to them, that the details will sort themselves out and any indiscretions can be hammered out at the end. It’s short sighted and it doesn’t work. It’s why nobody drives Land Rovers across the desert anymore – they fall apart. It’s why our trains are inefficient and our working hours high while productivity is low.

I’ve always admired the German way of doing things. Sorry to do it a third time but his ramblings did inspire mine, so here’s Erik again:

“The Germans are modular. Our language is modular. So we build shit. We build cars. We make tolerances. That’s why everyone drives Audis [...] It’s to do with the culture, we come from a modular, controlled, mechanical culture”

I appreciate that efficiency of design, the logic of production. Modular works. Working with building blocks is a good way to guarantee solid foundation. I wish the British were capable of it. I wish the Land Rover was still the tool of choice in the outback. I wish our trains ran on time, and that we didn’t need to work such long hours just to compete with everyone else.

It’s an often lonely place, having no choice but to work in the shoddy British way when desperate to adopt the logic of the Germans. You can feel a bit out-of-place. I’ve often wondered if Massimo Vignelli – one of the most vocal proponents of logic and order in graphic design, the most fierce defender of brutal modernism and from who’s wonderful grid-evangelistic publication I grabbed the above letterhead images – might think similarly of his home nation. After all, Italy is a country so focussed on beauty that its workmanship can often rival ours in the shoddiness charts. Or are his beliefs in logic and rigid structure contained merely within the realms of the aesthetic?

The concern is that logic and order aren’t particularly compatible with soul and beauty. While German workmanship is wonderful, it does lack a certain… flair. If we Brits were capable of such methodical excellence and supreme attention to detail, perhaps our talent for innovation, wit and resourcefulness would have never developed. Those big ideas of ours might have remained unimagined while we focussed on such trivial things as straight edges, tight tolerances and screwing things together properly.

My own taste for order and structure certainly comes at the cost of outright creativity. I approach work with a level head and I can always see what needs to be tidied, cleaned, oiled and greased. I can see where logic should be introduced, and I can be as creative as is possible within that logic. But given free reign and no restrictions, I’ll soon struggle.

Give me a big box of Lego and I’ll build you a fantastic house, but give me a big lump of clay and watch as I panic.