Tag Archives: Graphic Design

Sharing 03: Railways

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Recently I designed the new identity for this organisation, a charity and not for profit with the aim of reinstating a regular service to currently disused railway lines running through the city. The group formed in 2003 but after a bit of restructuring they’re planning on a relaunch later this year in a bid to attract more support and increase membership.

I’ve talked about trains on this blog before. We love our railways in the UK, but we seem to be confused about what a train is. It seems the ones we like are those funny old round ones powered by steam. The ones we decommissioned decades ago in favour of more efficient, faster and more relevant ones powered by diesel or electricity, the kind that don’t require a grubby man with a shovel to feed coal into a boiler.

It’s 2011, and these guys wanted to show that they were a modern group with modern aims. This isn’t a heritage railway project set up to satiate the desires of steam buffs. This is a practical, forward looking transport initiative working hard to bring a useful and relevant service to normal, everyday people who are at the minute reliant on cars or a patchy and infrequent bus service.

In search of modernity, naturally I headed straight to the 1960s. During the initial briefing it was agreed that the British Rail identity from that decade was something to aim for, so I got to work trying to capture that, but without using arrows of any description. Arrows are a hackneyed device at the best of times, but they’re all over the railways.

It’s been a funny job, this one. The organisation at the minute exists as a community campaign group, but in the future they may, or may not, be involved in the actual running of a railway. The best course of action for them to move forward is still unclear, so any identity has to be as open ended as the group is. It’s a strange client to have really – one that can’t say for sure what sort of client it might be in a years’ time.

Right now they don’t have much money kicking around, so bar a few higher budget bits of literature to get the word out, there’s probably going to be a lot of photocopies being handed around at various events the group attends. Any graphic design used in this way needs to be clear enough to survive such treatment, but at the same time it could well be seen in the future in all its full colour glory from a moving train window. So it has to stand up to that, it can’t look cheap.

Simplicity was key really. I had to focus specifically on those aspects of the group that are permanent. We know what the end result wants to be, we know the goal, so we’ll focus on that. That way, the content of the logo is also something to aim for.

Of course, as with all logos, it needed to be versatile and easily recognisable. And it needed to be of a style that distanced itself from the stuffy vintage image so frequently the distraction of the sector. This is a group that is serious about reinstating the rail service and goes about its business with an eye on the future, not on the past.

The stationery is similarly simple, with a bit more colour used on the batch of leaflets they’ve so far had printed up. I thought it was quite important that any literature they put out made their new, refreshed aims perfectly clear, so I pushed for the bold use of the mission statement on the front cover.

They only had 50 of these done. It was a bit of a last minute rush job for an event the group was attending, so they’re nothing special. To keep costs down they were printed on quite a flimsy stock and the layout is rather uninspiring because of the time constraints, the large amount of copy and a lack of inspiring imagery. Cheap and cheerful, they did their job fine but I’m working on something a bit more substantial at the moment which will involve a bit of photography and some nifty folding. I’ll share when I get the green light.

In an earlier blog, completely without context at that time, I posted a Harry Beck homage route map I produced for the group, designed to illustrate how their plan integrates with the city’s current and proposed public transport network. Apparently it’s proved quite a useful tool in convincing people how valuable the project is, which shows how a picture can say a thousand words. I also designed and built their website which can be seen here.

Graduation Shows 2011

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I’ve spent a couple of hours today perusing the work of Sheffield’s many graphic design students. Which means, rather worryingly, I’m a year older than when I wrote this fifteen minutes ago. So in the brief gap I have between now and heading off to the 2012 shows (or I die of old age) I better share my observations.

Thankfully for those whose work was featured, I’m not a design employer. If I was, none of them would stand a chance. Not because they were all crap, but because I am. I really struggle, and I think this more and more every year, to ascertain from a degree show which students are the good ones. It’s all student work, it all looks like student work, so you’re really looking for that potential. And I find it nigh on impossible to see the potential in a student just by scanning their portfolio.

A couple of years ago Michael Johnson wrote a piece about graduation shows in which he shared the method he used. When I first read it I found it irritating and dismissive, but actually if I’m honest it’s probably what I’d have to do:

“When you get there, find the course tutor and get a list of the 8 best students and er, ignore the rest (sorry). Do that for three days and you’ll get a result. It’s guaranteed.”

Student potential doesn’t always come across on the page. The potential is in the idea, in the discussions during classroom sessions, about how somebody engages with their peers, about how receptive they are to ideas, how they communicate. It’s about the excitement an individual shows for what they’re doing as they’re doing it, about their commitment to their work. That’s what being a student is. It’s not about the finished piece, it’s about the process. That’s where the spark makes itself known.

It’s quite a long time since my student days (I think it’s been about 70 years since I graduated, 90 by the time I’ve finished this sentence) but I can still remember being disappointed by every final piece I handed in. I had the passion for what I was doing, I loved bashing out ideas and using my head. I loved throwing concepts around with my fellow students (although I’ve since learnt they just wanted me to shut up). Yet every time I handed in my work I knew the finished article let me down. It always just looked a bit crap. My head was bursting with ideas but I could never translate them well to the page. I’m not talking about production values here – rather the delivery of my ideas. Coming up with a concept is one thing, but realising it is bloody hard. To be honest it doesn’t seem a great deal easier now, one hundred and seventy years later.

I imagine this is frequently the case for exceptional students too, not just the average ones like I. Any raw creativity a student has will inevitably get a bit lost when it finds its way onto the page. There are some decent ideas on display, no doubt about it, but they need decoding by those who understand how. Because to those of us who don’t, a really good idea handled badly just looks crap.

If I ever found myself scanning degree shows in the search for an employee, I think I’d just head straight to the course tutor and ask that they point me in the right direction. They’re the ones who get to see the potential because they were there for the interesting bits.

Sharing 01: Engineers

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These guys are a new start up engineering consultancy specialising in the design of building services. No, I didn’t know what that was either until they told me. Basically it’s pipes, cables, ducts and the like – the sort of stuff mostly hidden away in engine rooms or concealed behind suspended ceilings. Yet, as they were keen to point out, without such services even the most architecturally magnificent building is nothing but a large box. A building is made by such things, they are fundamental to any architectural project and the larger the project, the more complex they become.

Where the expertise lies with this consultancy is at the design stage of such a project. They use bafflingly complicated CAD software to plan and design the complicated networks of facilities that keep a building’s inhabitants supplied with that which they take for granted. They ensure that water will flow from taps, that thermostats will adjust temperatures, that switches will make bulbs glow, and they ensure it happens as efficiently and reliably as possible.

These are the qualities I used to direct the design of the logo. I let logic drive the project in much the way they themselves do with their work. Engineering isn’t art. It’s not about personal opinion, it’s a science. The only way to do something is the right way, and these chaps seem quite passionate about, and justifiably proud of, their ability to do just that.

I decided therefore that pure logic should be the only consideration of any design I did. This wasn’t the time for expression or creative indulgence. There was a job to do. A job I wanted to do in the same way the client does theirs.

First things first then, I needed a grid. I wasn’t going to do this by eye. Even my early sketches couldn’t be done by eye. Everything had to behave itself from the very beginning, so the grid came first. With that in place I started looking at the content. The brief stated that the logo was to be the initials of the company directors, the content was set. So I knew what it needed to be, I knew the grid it needed to conform to. Now I needed a method of constructing that content.

In the world of engineering an effective method of improving efficiency is to employ modularity, using fewer but more versatile components. So I did the same. The stylised initials are built of modular construction, with the design using only two separate components – the square and the quarter-circle.

The accompanying typeface is a mixture of Bold and Thin Helvetica Condensed, chosen in this instance for its obvious legibility. The type conforms to the same underlying grid that shapes the graphic, tying the whole logo together in one cohesive form.

With legibility a priority, the flat colour and the simple composition make for a scalable logo that should survive being used across all media, from a favicon to the side of a Transit van. Driven by pure logic, efficiency and order, I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they went for my first proposal. After all, engineers will be the first to point out that it’s quite hard to disagree with logic.

Design Research Unit

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Before I start this post I must point out that I’m not going to pander to acronym fans by opening with the perfectly accurate sentence “I took a DMU from SHF to LIV to see the DRU exhibition at LJMU”, just as I’m not going to pander to fans of self amused, post-ironic literary knot tying, beyond having done just the both.

It was with mixed emotions that I left the Design Research Unit (DRU) exhibition at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) this week. There’s nothing I can say about the history of the now effectively defunct DRU that hasn’t already been said online by more knowledgeable and articulate people than I, so if you’re interested in reading further may I refer you to Google’s handy and increasingly popular search facility.

The thing that struck me most about the body of work on show was the sense of excitement wrapped up in the time. With my nose pressed unselfconsciously against the perspex display cases I peered at the print, the photos and artifacts laid out before me, and I felt excited. I imagined what it must have been like for those post war design pioneers shaking off the shackles of the past and forging a new path to which a brighter future would conform. It was a national spring clean, a cathartic experience on a huge scale. The shape of the nation was ripe for streamlining, with design guiding the way, playing a fundamental role in a time of social mobility, economic and social growth. How I’d love to be plying my trade in such a time.

But I’m not. And that’s why the exhibition also made me feel disappointed. I look around at the world I live in and feel a sense of frustration that we’re in the same mess again. The spring clean wasn’t successful, our cupboards are still full of irrelevant crap. There are a good few bin bags full of stuff still to turf out, a few more car trips to the tip are needed, but it doesn’t happen. Because we remain a nation immovably untrusting of the modern, terrified to move beyond our comfort zone.

It’s as if we’ve decided things weren’t entirely terrible the way they were, so let’s leave it there. Yet the very past so frequently the target of our rose tinted reminiscing was one shaped by feudal regime, horribly unjust and thankfully completely irrelevant in 2011. Our architecture was shaped by the requirements of a family unit and class system that no longer exists, of heating and domestic requirements long since dismissed as vintage and laughably outdated. Why then do modern houses echo architectural styles founded centuries ago?  Why do our cars still have walnut dashboards? Why does innovation get so frequently quashed? Why are our ideas of luxury so Victorian? Why are we so obsessed with period dramas?

We appear not to realise that we hark back to a time when the majority of us would most likely be penniless, malnourished peasants with no hope of escape. How can we have such romantic views of ‘glory days’ we watch through a forty inch plasma? As industrial designer Karim Rashid points out in Gary Hustwit’s wonderful documentary film Objectified; we live in a technical revolution, yet we still sit on wood spindled chairs. What are we doing? The biggest move forward I can think of in recent years that has actually enjoyed universal acclaim is little more than a set of industrial air knives shoehorned into a grey and yellow box by James Dyson. Drying our hands in ten seconds certainly captures the imagination where building a more appropriate world doesn’t.

As it happened, through the window of the gallery I could see across the road a row of fairly modern houses, a product I’d guess of the late 90s. They were modern in age, yet in style they were anything but. With their little pitched roofs, wood panelled doors and mock Georgian sash windows, their little grass gardens skirted by iron railings, each post topped by an ineffectual but ornate spike, they just scream of a population scared to look forward.

We should have shook such nonsense off years ago. The ridiculous aristocratic rule of old has thankfully been (mostly) crushed and we’re free to shape our surrounding as it suits us. Come on people, stop focussing on the past, let’s look forward. Okay, Le Corbusier’s cities in the sky might well have failed, but don’t fear modernism itself, it can’t shoulder all the blame. Let’s see what we can do now, moving forward. Let’s not just run away with our fingers burned – nothing good comes without a little work.

I’ve moaned about this before, I know. But I’m a designer, and a designer is defined by his or her endless desire to improve the surroundings in which they find themselves. From the printed page to the built environment, from a turn of phrase to the systems in place, if there’s scope for improvement it’s where the designer’s mind lives. We’re the people who instinctively ask why things are the way they are. Blindly accepting the status quo isn’t in the nature, nor the remit of a designer.

So as I look at the work of the DRU I’m filled with excitement that they existed to build a better, more relevant and dynamic country. And saddened that, as I look around decades later it’s clear it didn’t much work. I look at my fellow Brits while they endlessly reminisce, and I can only reminisce about a time when people reminisced less.

Despite the amount of work on display, the thing I found most compelling was a photo of the DRU’s premises on Aybrook Street in Paddington, a typical four story London office block, to which in 1972 they added a rooftop extension. Due to the fading of the photos I couldn’t tell if it was orange or yellow, but it was a wonderfully modern steel or aluminium construction featuring long horizontal windows with radiused corners. Inside was one huge open plan studio space, well lit and airy. Ignoring the conservative style of the building on which it sat, the extension took the form (and probably borrowed the technology) of a somewhat squat aircraft fuselage.

It was architecture serving as a wonderful statement for an organisation involved in taking the design world forward, upward. Building and improving upon the existing infrastructure with a clean and fresh approach chosen to serve the contemporary needs of contemporary people. It illustrated for me, above every other exhibit on display, the defining essence of the DRU.

When I got home I immediately clicked online and located the premises on Google Street View to get a look at the rooftop extension as it appears today, to see how this 1970s vision of modernity looks in the cold, cynical light of 2011.

It’s gone. In its place sits a new fifth floor extension. New. One with a pitched, tiled roof and little dormer windows. It doesn’t look like an extension at all. It looks like it has been in place as long as the building itself.

Many thanks to Paul Robert Lloyd for making his photos from the exhibition available under a creative commons licence.

Don’t Jump 2: Gingerbread Men

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This post follows on from an earlier one which regular readers will probably recall. If you’re an irregular reader you might want to click through and catch up before reading on.

A bicycle related body-ground interface recently left me with a rather awkwardly broken hand, and after a few hours of head scratching by the hand specialists at the local hospital it was decided that I needed surgery. A day later I was flat on my back in an operating theatre, trying my best to count the ceiling tiles and think calm thoughts while three surgeons cut, drilled and inserted bits of metal into my hand. When I’d been sewn back up and sent on my way and people were asking how it had gone, the only retort I could think of each time was ‘harrowing’. It seems a rather dramatic choice of word now, but at the time I wasn’t a happy bunny.

Aware of my rather low mood and the prospect of few months of forced inactivity, a friend visited a couple of days later and produced from her bag something guaranteed to cheer me up. Cheer me up it did. Within less than a minute I had been lifted from my miserable pit of self pity and transformed into a big kid stuffing my ridiculous face with gingerbread man. As I brushed the crumbs from my shirt I realised that it’s impossible to be grumpy while eating a gingerbread man.

As an adult there’s something so utterly preposterous about the act of eating one. The ludicrous cartoon anthropomorphism, the smarties for eyes and the icing grin – it all adds up to one of the most basic, innocent and delightful pleasures I can think of. Yes, my hand still hurt, I hadn’t forgotten my harrowing ordeal. I was still in plaster and on a load of pain killers, but with every bite of that delicious biscuity figure it all just seemed to matter less. I had to concede that life can’t be that bad while ever I’m eating a gingerbread man.

It’s true. Following a nuclear fallout there are probably no gingerbread men. Trapped in a submarine awaiting rescue, the chances are there won’t be gingerbread men. While being dealt a vicious and frenzied mauling by a large jungle cat in Borneo, there will probably be no gingerbread men. But while ever there are gingerbread men within easy reach, while we as a society can find the time to bake them, give them a face and inexplicably decorate their shirtless torso with buttons, and while we’re all at liberty to fill our ridiculous mouths with them, surely things can’t be that bad.

This all made me wonder if the gingerbread man might hold the answer to my earlier ponderings. Could the small, biscuity fellow help rid the world’s high bridges of all those horribly unsympathetic, inhuman signs?

Here is my proposal. Click for the full size.

Samaritans Bridge Sign Redesign

A small sealed box is attached to the wall. The front consists of a thin laminated glass panel in the manner of an office fire alarm, behind which a gingerbread man is housed. Using the attached hammer, anyone in need can crack the glass and access the contents, behind which is located the phone number for the Samaritans. The local group would replace the gingerbread man with a fresh one every morning.

I’m aware that it seems like a ridiculous idea and I do feel a bit silly for suggesting it, especially having just spent the past forty five minutes illustrating the whole thing. And not for a moment do I believe that I have any real insight into the mind of the suicidal just because I broke my hand a couple of months ago. I’m not claiming to understand it at all. I do just really believe in the power of the gingerbread man.

You see it’s really very hard to take anything seriously – particularly yourself – while you eat a gingerbread man. In order to be contemplating suicide one must clearly be taking things very seriously indeed, so perhaps the brief, bizarre and ridiculous interlude of eating a gingerbread man might be just what’s needed to break the mood for long enough to convince someone that perhaps they should pick up the phone instead.

Plus, what says “we care” quite like leaving out a fresh gingerbread man for anyone who needs it? Even if not a single one were to ever be eaten, surely on that one message alone this concept wins over all those bloody horrible signs.

Picture credits for above photos, clockwise from top left:
break.things, Danny Howard, Mark Morton, Ellen.
Many thanks to all for making their pictures available for reproduction under creative commons licenses.

It’s Logo, not Lostop.

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There’s every possibility that by the time you read this it will be on a different site to the one I wrote it on. At the time of writing my blog is called ‘Sprungseven’, but I intend to change everything to my own domain at some point in the near future, by which time the blog should carry my real, given name; the one sewn into my PE kit.

The story behind the name ‘Sprungseven’ is a boring and irrelevant one, as I’m sure are the stories behind many hastily decided net handles. It is however an online name I’ve used for some years in order to allow anonymity from the cyber stalking so prevalent on the various chat forums and social networking sites I’ve once frequented and long since abandoned.

So if you’re reading this and wondering what on earth ‘Sprungseven’ is, it used to be the name of this blog. Sorry if that’s a little confusing, but forgive me for not having too much sympathy. You’re from the future – you have hover cars for crying out loud, how bad can your life be?

To those reading this in its original context around the time of first publication, I’m sorry to have wasted three paragraphs’ worth of what I imagine to be your valuable time. And though it’s hard, try not to be jealous of the swanky future readers above – they might sneer at our primitivity from the seats of their gleaming alloy aircars but the zombie apocalypse is a lot sooner for them than it is us.

Preface over.

Branding is the aspect of graphic design I’m most interested in. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the process of Logo design. It’s often said, and I agree, that the ultimate expression of the graphic designer’s art is the design of a good logo. In my opinion there is no greater skill within the industry than condensing an entire company image – with all the complexities that will invariably entail – down into a single instantly identifiable symbol.

In fact my main professional aspiration is to design a truly good logo. If I can one day put my name to something as clever and elegant as the BR double arrow, the Fedex Arrow, the UPS parcel, the Shelter H or the More Th>n more than, I’ll die a happy man.

That might seem like an unlikely achievement but I’m still young. As the More Th>n designer himself says, “identity designers don’t quite find their feet until later in their twenties”, so by that reckoning I have about a year before it clicks and I suddenly find myself crushed under the delightful weight of a thousand yellow pencils. Until that inevitability I suppose I must keep at it, playing around with logos whenever I get the chance in a hope that my skills develop.

One such recent play came about during a bit of a dry spell. I was eager for a bit of branding work but the only projects coming my way seemed to be editorial design. Though I enjoy editorial stuff I was starting to feel a bit of logo withdrawal, so decided to find something to design. Sprungseven would get its first logo.

One of the most satisfying aspects of logo design is when a gift presents itself to you. Finding it can be like a puzzle the designer has to decode. Sometimes, if you look long enough a solution pops right out of the text, offering the perfect opportunity for a simple, elegant design. Sprungseven offered just such a gift. When set in Helvetica, the numerical ’7′ has a graceful curve to its upright, rather like the graceful curve of a tensioned leaf spring; a length of metal deflected under pressure, ready to twang back straight at the first opportunity.

In my sketchbook I began to scribble various ideas, all the time trying to graphically represent the springiness of that character. I drew dodgy leaf springs in the ridiculous hope that the general public is as familiar with the rather outmoded method of vehicle suspension as I am. I drew comic book style wobble lines attempting to show the pressure, the potential energy stored in that vertical. I tried ugly whiz lines and awkward blurred overlays. I doodled a storyboard idea, with frames showing the 7 springing back to it’s ‘original’ shape (similar to an upturned uppercase L). I had practically drawn a cell animation.

It was a mess of an idea. The whole design relied entirely on motion, and here I was trying to show that on a static canvas, all the time categorically failing to adhere to those rules of simplicity and elegance always so obvious in my favourite logos.

“Oh blow it” I resigned, casting my pen down across the desk, sitting back in my seat. “Why can’t it just move? It would be so much easier if logos could move. Why can’t logos move?” I studied the page. “Actually, why can’t logos move?”

Can logos move? I’m tempted to say yes. In 2010, given the right circumstances, why not? In this instance, certainly. Sprungseven has no offline presence in any form. The logo never appears in print. If it exists only in the virtual world, surely a logo need never be static?

I do recognise that there is no shortage of logos that animate. Some of the most familiar logos have animated versions.

There are plenty of logos that can move. But is there room for logos that must move?

Today printed media is rapidly losing out to digital media. Magazine and newspaper publishers struggle to get themselves on the iPhone and the iPad in the hope of tackling the ever dwindling sales threatening their continued employment. High street record shops struggle to keep their doors open while MP3 download figures soar. It’s no surprise when you consider that there now exists an entire generation of consumer that has grown up without that in-built requirement, that feeling of satisfaction to actually hold something physical, to have it sat on a shelf in order to claim ownership.

I’m as clueless about the future of media as everybody else except Jobs, Ive and Schmidt, (well, perhaps I’m a bit more clued up than my mum but that hardly makes me an extra from The Jetsons) but it certainly makes you wonder what changes are around the corner. I must admit to feeling slightly scared about it. The rules have changed – the industry as we know it is transforming rapidly and beyond almost all recognition. It feels as if the rug is being yanked from beneath our feet, and it’s quite disconcerting.

But do you know what? My fears are overwhelmed by excitement. Just a few years ago the thought of designing a logo incapable of standing still would have been laughable, but now it doesn’t seem so daft.

There are a heck of a lot of good logos out there. Sometimes it can be hard to think of new ones without stepping on the toes of those already in use. Often you’ll find a nice solution only for a colleague to walk past your desk and instantly break your heart and crush your spirit by saying those two words most feared by genuine graphic designers: “Been Done”.

Perhaps then as we enter the age of motion-friendly media, an age where timelines play an equal role in design alongside X, Y and Z coordinates, we’re open to a whole new dimension of graphic design opportunity.

Surely there can’t be a designer on the planet who doesn’t find that fantastically liberating.

Addition: Interestingly, it would still be possible to make printed versions of a moving logo using Lenticular Printing. So as it happens, logos don’t even really need to stay still on the printed page. Well, as long as your production budget stretches far enough. Google’s first hit for ‘lenticular business cards’ gave me a quote of £2500 for 2500. A quid per card – eek!

Don’t Jump

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Don't jump... it's not high enough

In a recent piece I wrote for typoholic website My Type Of… I raised the rather morbid subject of designing for the suicidal.

I’ve noticed these signs on a few high bridges over the years and found myself wondering what I’d do if given the task of designing such a thing. The first time the thought occurred to me was during a touristy stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge when I was 21, and most recently came back to mind when taking a similar touristy stroll over the somewhat smaller but equally magnificent Tyne Bridge just a week ago.

Potential solutions hadn’t really gone beyond layout consideration, brief thoughts on which typefaces, colours and graphics might be enough to convince the suicidal that there’s a point to carrying on. The current solutions are after all, a bit plain, a bit anonymous and inhuman. I wonder if a black uppercase serif really is the typography to prevent potential jumpers. Maybe something a bit more informal might be more suitable? Maybe I’ve finally found a valid use for Comic Sans? I joke of course. But whatever the perfect solution might be, I really think getting there would be an interesting (if morbid) process.

With vague thoughts on the subject going round my head, it’s a sheer coincidence then that Gizmodo should run the following story; Bridge Projector Reminds Suicide Jumpers “You Are Not Alone”.

What a marvelous solution – a great example of thinking outside the box. Here I was, wondering what I might screw to the wall in place of the current signs, and here these guys simply project the message directly onto the water below. An inspired idea, a very creative solution dealing with a very difficult subject.

It really is a difficult subject isn’t it, suicide. One people will so rarely discuss. A(n obviously now ex-) colleague of mine committed suicide a few years ago, and I was amazed at how a company full of free-thinking creatives were absolutely unwilling to even mention it. Even years afterwards it remained an unspoken subject, any mere mention of his name never failing to leave a bizarre awkwardness resonating throughout the studio.

When I’ve seen the Samaritans signs on bridges I’ve thought the lack of emotion, their simple, plain and apparently unconsidered design really tells of the subject’s awkwardness. Nobody has really wanted to sit down and deal with it, to gather around a table with notepads and cups of coffee and really try to get into the heads of the target audience in the way they might brainstorm any other brief. After all, who wants to do that? Who really wants to stand on top of a bridge, staring at the black water below, contemplating their existence in the name of research? Nobody, of course. It’s totally understandable, but it’s a shame that such a serious and important subject is so rarely given the same creative attention and treatment we give everything else.

Just think how much money must be spent every single day on marketing. Consider the amount of hours we pour into dreaming up new and interesting ways to brand, advertise, market and sell superfluous consumer goods. Items like reduced-fat apple and mango triple decker caramel wafers, hotelier’s association approved five-star microfibre pillow cases, low-energy teflon coated ceramic anti-static waffle irons and Norwegian formula bluetooth-enabled Y-fronts. Surely we can spare a few of those hours, a few of those creative sparks, to dealing with more serious and very much more real issues?

If we took every marketing expert, graphic designer, copywriter, packaging designer and advertising executive off their more usual and superfluous commercial tasks and instead told them to focus on the very real problem of combatting sky-high global suicide rates, we might start to see some really good solutions, solutions of a quality and effectiveness currently so lacking.

With the creative industry’s collective mind busy with that, and thus no longer focussed on pointless, soul-destroying consumerist bullshit, perhaps the ultimate solution eventually arrived at would be to simply unscrew the signs and throw them away, because they’d no longer be needed.

Thanks to Craig Rodway for making the title image “Don’t Jump… it’s not high enough” available for public display under a Creative Commons licence.

Celebrity Designers

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Back in my student days I once got talking to a girl in a pub who worked for a prestigious car dealership specialising in expensive Italian exotica. Her immaculate manicure suggested little time spent under bonnets, and she was too genuine to be a saleswoman, so I assumed she had some sort of admin or reception role. Being both a car anorak and useless at talking to women, I asked what sort of stuff they had in stock but she replied with a disinterested shrug of the shoulders. My useless bank of chat up lines now exhausted I readied myself for a rapid dismissal, but it didn’t happen. Instead she moved forward in her seat, leant over the table and conspiratorially beckoned me towards her, scanning her surroundings while reaching into her handbag. My mind started racing. Had my knowledge of performance cars finally impressed a female? Is she going to give me her number? Or am I about to be jabbed with a sedative and stuffed in the back of a van for interrogation by the KGB? She looked me in the eye and instructed me that I wasn’t to ever share what she was about to show me, before producing a small strip of paper from her handbag. “Check this out”, she said.

It was a compliment slip. A badly designed compliment slip. The logo looked like it was for a spa resort in Hampshire. Wherever it was, it was called ‘The Beckhams’. I looked back up at her expectant, excited face, clearly ignorant to the significance of the slip. “The Beckhams!”, she reinforced, impatiently and insistently shaking the slip in front of me to drill the point home. I was none the wiser. “As in David and Victoria!”. The penny dropped. Oh, I see. I asked why she had it. “They bought a car from us, and this is their compliment slip! How cool is that?!”

While my design student mind had immediately focussed on the bad typography and awkward composition of the two colour plus foil block on one-third A4 in heavy, off-white stock, I’d overlooked the real magnificence of the item. It was something from The Beckhams. The Beckhams! As in David and Victoria, the footballist and the Spice Girl! Oh em eff gee! She slipped it back in her bag and I remained baffled at its inclusion in proceedings until conversation waned and she disappeared into the night to find more interesting people to talk to; fashionable people I imagine more easily impressed by stationery items from couplings of stars sport and pop.

For the first time the reality of celebrity obsession had hit me. I knew newspapers and magazines were always rabbiting on about celebrity weddings and the lives of the rich and famous, and I’d seen the endless photos of minor royals and soap stars falling out of taxis in front of nightclubs. I’d just assumed it was irrelevant to most people, mere editorial white noise the media used to fill empty column space and airtime. After all, nobody I knew seemed to care in the slightest about any of it. Here though, for the first time in my life, I had been sat at a table with a real person who actually and very openly cared about celebrities. I was genuinely shocked by the excitement that small piece of office stationery appeared to induce in her – the thought stayed with me all night, and remained with me long enough for me to break my promise of secrecy and write about it almost a decade later.

Nowadays of course I’m well aware of celebrity obsession, as we all are. I’m still occasionally shocked when I realise seemingly sensible and respectable people read Heat Magazine, but I shouldn’t be. It’s part of British culture. So many of us aspire to live in big houses and be rich and famous for doing very little, and reading about them allows us to fantasise. It takes us into their world. It’s about aspiration. It’s utterly pathetic but worryingly, as time goes on I’m beginning to understand it myself.

As a graphic designer, I follow what’s going on in the industry. I check the design blogs and feeds, read what’s happening out there, what’s new. I read updates on the careers of successful designers and agencies, about the talented and admired pushing forward the boundaries of creativity. I take an interest from a professional point of view, but also from a personal one. I read the Johnson Banks blog, for instance, because I’m interested in the work they’re doing, but also because I aspire to be a part of it. I want to be in their world.

Do you know how it makes me feel? Well, it inspires me, but often it makes me jealous. It tugs on my aspiration strings. I imagine myself doing that sort of work, being in that world, the world I’ve wanted to join since I filled in my college application form. I look at the work of the creative elite and follow the output of gifted newcomers, all the time wishing I was there alongside them, wishing I was one of those being read about, being given awards and recording interviews for the magazines. Because I’m not in that world, because I’m just an everyday chap doing average work in a humdrum provincial town, it makes me feel inadequate. Jealous. I read what happens at the sharp edge to feel like I’m in the loop, to feel like I’m a part of the proper design world before I return to whatever normal, unremarkable job currently pays the bills.

For us designers it’s not Cheryl Tweedy we care about but Michael Johnson and his peers. The design elite are our celebrities, our heroes, our idols. While the rest of the population obsess over the holiday snaps and love affairs of pop stars, we obsess over the portfolios and career arcs of top designers, longing to live the lives they do. Longing for that same respect, that same positive feedback on our existence, the affirmation that we’re a valid part of the creative world. We look at them and we think they have it all, they are how we aspire to be. As the make-up caked teenage girl on the street dreams of being a footballers wife, we dream of running our own internationally renowned studio, its shelves bowing under the weight of yellow pencils and prestigious client lists.

On face value it sounds like a daft comparison to make. It’s a theory that I’ve had for a while and to be honest I just assumed it said more about my own professional insecurities than it does anything else. Only recently I’ve noticed something which has started to back it up.

Whenever a design website features a write-up on some new and interesting project, a review of a new design retrospective, key note speech or anything of any creative value, the reader comments sections that follow always seem to consist of aggressive and angry fault-finding. Comment after comment tears strips off the subject, the people involved are slammed and the work dismissed in all manner of harsh ways. The comments always seem to be dominated by negative feelings, by an audience seemingly baying for blood. As it happens, Johnson Banks don’t have the facility for reader commenting and there’s really no wonder. It’s as if the everyday graphic designer is hunting for a slight chink in the armour of those at the top of the tree so they can exploit it and bring them down, even if only for a moment. If only to provide a brief moment of superiority for an audience who otherwise feel helplessly inferior.

It all seems very similar to those readers of Heat magazine and other such tabloid trash; those who take great pleasure in pouring scorn over a multi-millionaire celebrity whose flabby inner thigh has been caught in the paparazzi’s telephoto. It’s jealousy.

Unportfolioable Skills

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A graphic designer lives by his or her portfolio. So what happens when much of your skill set isn’t visible in your portfolio?

Here’s an email I received on the last day of my previous job, sent from one of the mid level managers (the acronyms are development code names for projects):

“I know you don’t always like a lot of fuss, so I’ll do this low key.

I just wanted to say a quick and sincere word of thanks for all the outstanding work you’ve done on my projects. I feel you have been a little bit of an unsung hero, you sit quietly and literally get on with things, and even when we get strange and daft requests, you’ve took them all in your stride and fixed them up with the minimum of fuss.

Would SSR and SST have been quite so great without you? I suspect not.”

Throughout my career so far I have made myself very useful. Perhaps a bit too useful, because I’m now starting to regret it. Reliability and dependability are qualities that rarely get you chosen for the prestigious work when there will always be a thousand bread and butter jobs that need doing to keep the company afloat.

Sometimes I wish I’d spent more time being a prima donna. The glory-hunting type that moans when they’re not creatively stimulated for even the briefest moment. Yes, I’d be a nightmare to work with, arrogant, unreliable, my projects consistently late and in a mess, but at least my portfolio would be impressive.

And while it’s nice to be called an unsung hero, to thrive creatively it helps – just occasionally – to be sung.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

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For the current crop of graphic design students preparing to enter the industry, there has never been a harder time to graduate. It was the same when I graduated almost a decade ago, and no doubt it will still be the same in another ten years.

Yesterday I found myself mildly irritated by this website, featuring a downloadable iPhone app allowing visitors to rate the cliches so often trotted out at design degree shows.

Well isn’t that just lovely.

Hey kids, you’re just about to enter the big wide world of graphic design, the one you’ve decided to dedicate your life to, and you’re currently in the process of displaying the very best you’ve had to offer over the last three years. Let us point out how crap it all is. What fun!

That’s right, fellow designers. From the safety of our nice jobs in the industry, let us pour scorn on the poor saps trying to grab the bottom rung of the ladder we’re constantly and relentlessly pulling up. After all, there’s nothing more confidence-destroying than having your very best efforts laughed at by those you’re trying to impress before you even get a word in. Ha ha, he he.

Come on people. I know anybody working in the creative industries is going to have to get used to soul destroying dismissals every day of their working life, but surely this is too much, too soon? What’s more, none of it is any different to your show – your student work was just the same. It’s the way of the world, an annually recurring event and the very thing you’re pointing out.

Thinking back to my time as a student, I remember always being just outside my comfort zone. I was so desperate not to just do the same work as everyone else, so desperate to hold my head above the rest that I constantly pushed myself beyond my abilities. For four years I punched above my weight and the results were, well, most often fairly abysmal.

It was hard. And that was a decade ago, when the internet wasn’t so much a daily part of our lives. Nowadays students aren’t just comparing themselves to their fellow course mates, but the rest of the world. Everything they see on the design blogs, Creative Review feeds, Flickr and the chat forums are full of creative output. Everybody is at it, all the time comparing and sharing, and to stick your head above that is nigh on impossible. No matter how good you are there will always be another better than you, and that’s a rule you can apply to every single person in the world apart from one.

Design education is supposed to be time you spend studying, experimenting and developing your talent. The time when you merrily trot your way through the same cliches everyone does, visiting those places everyone has to visit before being able to move on. You study the great masters, the contemporary heroes, the cutting edge developments, developing trends, and you experiment for yourself, you find your style, what you like and what works for you.

Graphic design is, like any creative industry, a total nightmare because an idea is only of any value the first time it’s seen. After that point it becomes instantly hackneyed. As a fresh faced graduate you’re at the bottom of the pile, right in the middle of a creative minefield. There are many decades worth of ideas out there that you must avoid copying. New is good, new new new. That’s what we want. More more more, new new new. Now please. No, I’ve already seen that in Word magazine 15 years ago when you were a toddler. Get out of my sight, you’re blocking my potential view of something new.

When I look at the work of the old masters (those designers about whom there are large and expensive coffee table books) I often find myself surprised by how naive it can seem viewed through modern cynical eyes. Famous pieces of work taking pride of place on a gallery wall for us to gush over – once so cutting edge and groundbreaking – would now be unacceptable. If you pulled something like that out of the bag today you’d get dismissed, because it’s old, it’s been done. Doesn’t matter if it’s great, it only works first time around.

Us creatives aren’t happy to settle for anything. We want our minds blown every single day by fresh and exciting new ideas, to live in a world full of that which has not gone before. But it’s an impossible wish. For every person at the cutting edge there must be a huge wake consisting of everyone else playing catch up. That person up at the sharp end, the one with the yellow pencils and job offers galore might set the trend, but you’re not allowed to do anything similar as that’s just derivative and hackneyed. Move on granddad, we only want new. If you’re not at your own sharp end, you’re nothing. Thats the world the modern design student comes into.

Alan Fletcher designed the above Pirelli advert in 1961. It’s great, but it’s the sort of idea that the student me would have sketched briefly and then dismissed as not enough, too basic, already done. It’s wonderful, ground breaking, hugely skillful (no object > envelope distort clickery in the 60s…) and I love it, but it just won’t fly today. That’s the difference. Fletcher got to experiment in public for years. He moved the game on, invented so much that we take for granted today and deserves every ounce of respect he gained, but though you’ll not hear anything other than awe come from my direction, I have to point out that we’re not allowed to do the same. We don’t get that same chance. Because it’s been done as early as 50 years ago and the cynical audience of today knows that. Fletcher, and others of his generation and stature were so often on the frontier, so of course every idea they had was new and exciting. They were big fish in a small pond.

Nowadays that pond has grown into an ocean, and it’s regularly topped up with ever more fish. We all operate in a post-post-post-post-modern world, and in order to make a name for yourself you’ve got to just be ace from day one. Hitting the ground running isn’t really enough – sprinting past Usain Bolt might get noticed, but only if people appreciate your gait. You have to have taken into consideration the life’s work of every great master, industry elder and post-modern hipster to have gone before, and accept that your starting point is where they finished. And unlike in other industries where you can build on what has gone before, we designers aren’t really at much of a liberty do so, or at least admit that we do so. Building on somebody else’s idea is, well, sort of copying. It’s certainly not new. The only way that’s achievable is to start with a totally clean sheet and hope you don’t tread on somebody’s toes along the way. But there’s a lot of toes to tread on, and if you trip up and fail to provide new or fresh, you can quickly find your work considered worthless, and we’ll make apps so we can have fun quantifying that worthlessness with our iPhones.

We all have to go through it. Every professional designer has been there. But the curve of diminishing returns is flatter now than it was when we came in. It’s harder now and it will be every year, so try to be a bit more understanding. The point made by the cliche-spotting app isn’t wrong, I agree with the sentiment. It’s all true, well observed and actually quite funny. But I’m far from comfortable with the delivery.

There were, after all, no such thing as iPhone apps for sneering, self-satisfied know-it-alls to take the piss out of your show. It might seem like harmless fun but back at my graduation show, I can guarantee seeing that app would have secretly brought me close to tears. Certainly it would have made it very hard for me to stand proudly in front of my work, to maintain a slight bit of self esteem and sense of dignity while entering the battle to get a foot in the miniscule crack in the barely open door of the industry, armed only with a student portfolio.

I wonder how you’d have felt.