Noisy Decent Graphics

"Old ladies dropped their parcels in shock"

Rev. W. Awdry

"off to the guardian - alan rusbridger read my blog and asked for me to meet with him"

Amelia Torode

"You can't beat quite good and free"

Russell Davies

How To Win A D&AD Award

That's a deliberately contentious title, and it's wrong. But it's what I would have wanted to say had I met someone who had judged the D&AD Awards when I was younger.

And that's kind of how I'm going to write this post. It's been bothering me for a while because there is so much to say, so I'm just going to write this in note form.

Judging would make a great RPG.

1. How to win a D&AD Award.
Do really, bloody good work. That's it.

Do work that you know is good, the office knows is good, your client knows is good and your Mum knows is good. Work that stands up to discussion. Work that you can look at again and again and it's still good. That's all.

2. Favouritism.
"It's always so and so that wins." That's probably because they do really good work. Every year. You see when you're judging you don't know who the work is by, so it's very hard to claim that people vote for their mates. I suppose people may recognise work by their friends and vote for that, but I saw no evidence of that.

3. Standards.
The standard is high, very high. Too high? Broadly speaking I don't think so (although you may get tough juries in any given year). Look at previous Pencil winners in design; Johnson Banks' Fruit and Veg Stamps (Gold), Penguin's Great Ideas series (Silver) and Nick Bell's Churchill Museum (Silver). Have you ever done work that good?

The jury I was on was tough in the respect that we only wanted the best stuff to get through. Average simply wasn't good enough. I thought we were incredibly fair and very comprehensive in our discussions.

4. History
I felt, and I believe my fellow jurors felt, some sort of responsibility towards the history of the awards. Again, look at all the great work that has gone before. You want your judging to be up to that standard.

5. Entering the bloody thing.
I always find entering the D&AD Awards really hard. It's hard enough choosing what work to enter, but it's even bloody harder deciding what category to enter it in. After judging, I wouldn't worry about that so much. Good work is good work and good work really stands out amongst a day of dross, whatever category it's in.

When a piece of work wins an award a klaxon goes off and these two chaps wheel over a huge yellow pencil. It's an exciting moment.

6. Jaded jurors.
Judging is hard work. No-one will ever believe that unless they've judged, but it's exhausting. We looked at (in detail) over 150 pieces of work. In the morning. Then we spent the afternoon, discussing, debating and arguing over the same bits of work. Often several times. Believe me, it's tiring. Unfortunately this means it's very easy to get cynical and jaded. My jury tried really hard to fight this and to make sure we looked at the first piece of work with the same eyes we looked at the last piece of work. All this just means the good stuff stands out even more. A bit like life, I suppose.

7. There's a lot of shit out there.
The D&AD received 25,000 entries this year. Out of that little lot 54 were nominated for an award. Why so little? Because there's a lot of shit out there. Seen as a group, so much of the work looks very similar, very dull and very uninspiring. That's why the good stuff stands out.

8. Advertising always wins.
Advertising wins more awards than graphic design. Why? Because the advertising industry is bigger than the design industry, by almost any measure you care to choose, amount of employees or turnover for example. The only other thing is that I imagine design is judged more on craft whereas advertising is judged more on the idea. It's easier to agree on an idea being good than the craft being perfect. Maybe.

9. Remember the criteria.
A good idea, well executed, and appropriate to medium and message.

More pictures here.

Put down your logos and come fly with me, naked

Annoyingly I can't remember where I heard this; the other day I heard a gentleman from Rolls Royce saying that if airlines didn't paint their planes with fancy livery the lack of paint would reduce the weight of the aircraft and thus reduce the amount of fuel needed to get from A to B and therefore reduce their carbon emissions.

Sounds so simple doesn't it?

I've always wondered about plane livery, surely they don't need to be painted to be identified? There must be a more technically advanced way of identifying planes.

So why paint them? They can only ever be seen for a short time when passengers are shuttling from one vapid corridor to another. Sure, everywhere you can put the logo helps, but maybe it's time to remove the livery and fly naked planes for sake of carbon emissions.

I can't really find anything about this on the net apart from some news about Virgin Atlantic planning to use a lighter paint for their fleet.

Call the precogs

I saw this the other day from the top floor of our office.

Across the way, some bloke was demonstrating what looked like a huge touch screen white board, almost Minority Report style. He moved his hand across the board and the screen reacted, like a touch screen interface.

Anyone know anything about that?

The only design blog

Design Observer have been nominated for a People's Choice Webby Award. Which is nice.

They're in the Blog Personal/Cultural category. Design Observer isn't perfect, but I like it a lot. Each different writer has a different style and I like some writers more than other, two good recent posts include Dancing to the Sound in Your Head by Mr Poyner and Good At Art by Mr Bierut (I'm minded of that Alan Fletcher joke about 'all those years having your name spelt wrong' but I can't remember it in full) and this brilliant post from the archives about how the house Mr Bierut grew up in affected his life as a designer.

Anyway, they're the only design blog nominated at all. For anything. So really we should get behind them. You can vote here. Get voting.

D&AD Flag Project

I like to think that all my listeners are a clever bunch, but Andrew is cleverer than most. Back here he spotted that the Flag pictures I've been doing didn't quite, "reflect the playful, subversive tone of voice" of other stuff we've done.

He was right. Those pictures were just messing about, because we had something a little more subversive in mind.

The brief asked me to produce a piece of work that said something about me and my relationship with creativity. I thought long and hard about that. It's easy to find stuff you were inspired by or hark back to your college days. But really all that stuff has been about getting to where I am now. My life long love affair with creativity has spawned this which I set up with four friends six years ago.

As you know, members of The Design Conspiracy never show our faces in the press or promotional literature. Over the years this has caused surprise and amusement, especially when we asked one press photographer to shoot the back of our heads.

Therefore it made perfect sense to make the flag into a mask, cunningly using the ampersand as eye holes. So, above is a picture of me staying true to The Design Conspiracy's publicity guidelines whilst wearing what I hope is the first ever D&AD mask.

There are a few more pictures here, including some of me in the mask with the current D&AD president, Mr Tony Davidson.

Picture with Tony taken by Christine Donnier-Valentin. Tom took most of the other pictures and April made the mask.

"We will put flies in the urinals - yes"

This is the urinal at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam.

Nice isn't it? See that little black thing, middle left? It's a fly.

Not a real fly, a painted fly. The fly was painted onto all the urinals in Schipol Airport because, according to Mr Aad Kieboom, an economist, giving men something to aim at reduces spillage by 80%.

Clever, eh?

This is one of those things that someone tells you is true, you want to be true and the internet tells you is true; but you're still not 100% sure is true. Perhaps someone can tell me, is this true?

Tuesday morning - time for a compostable packaging update

I'm actually quite impressed with this. I think it's been 6 weeks since I first condemned the packaging to the compost heap and I'm quite surprised at how far it's composted. (Other pictures here and here).

What do you think? Did you expect faster progress?

Pelicans: Part 2

Blimey.  Richard does it again. Part 2 of all his Pelicans.

My only question; Richard, are they on Flickr yet?

Interesting 2007

You may or may not have heard of Russell's Interesting 2007 conference. We've been working on the look of it (doesn't seem right to write logo or brand). It's an unusual project project because obviously we don't need any letterheads or anything like that. But we do need something. So here's the brief we've been working to.

It must be interesting. Obviously. But there is a fine line between interesting and downright messy.

It must encompass the principles of web 2.0 (by that I mean updateable, participatory, flexible and interactive) whilst being offline quite a lot.

It must utilise the attendees as collaborators.

Assume zero budget.

It must be able to dictate the look of the hall.

It must be carbon neutral.

It must be good.

Got all that?

So here's the logotype for the conference.

You can download it here as an eps, so if you want to mix it up, make your own stuff or simply use it on your blog then feel free. You can also use the jpeg above, obviously. It's designed to be easy to stencil and screen and steal.

Here's some other things we're going to do.

Posters
If you're going to the conference, send us your old posters. Old conference posters, Def Leopard posters. Anything. Bear in mind you won't get them back, so please don't send in your limited edition Saul Bass prints or your signed Banksys. We're going to make something exciting (and big) from all of them, but it's a secret for now.

Tshirts
If you're going to the conference, send us one of your tshirts. We'll screenprint it with the logo, anywhere and anyhow we like. It will be ready for you to collect on the day where it will constitute official conference wear. And it's guaranteed to be the right size.

Bags
We're going to collect all the carrier bags we use before June and reuse them as conference bags to hold anything you may need to carry on the day. We'll screen print them with the logotype and they should look something like this.

How does that sound?

Please send things to: Emma Holloway, Interesting 2007, The Design Conspiracy, 12 Stukeley Street, London WC2B 5LQ. Be sure to say who you are so we can make sure you get the right tshirt back.

Remember that you won't get the posters back and they will probably be cut up. You will get the tshirt back but it will have the logotype screen printed on it.

interesting2007

This is my favourite shirt

I bought it with some money my Granny gave me for my 18th birthday. That makes it 13 years old. I bought it in a shop in Bath called John Anthony for £75.

Wearing it the other day, several things struck me.

1. What the hell was I doing spending £75 on a shirt! 13 years ago £75 must have been the price of a Mini, or a parking space in Chelsea or something. I'd wouldn't dream of spending £75 on a shirt now. I guess we didn't have the £4.99 H&M classic in 1993.

2. Secondly, it's 13 years old. 13 bloody years. That's almost half my bloody life. Almost. I'd be surprised if I owned anything else (that I'd bought) that was 13 years old. Certainly I don't own any teenage clothes. Do you? Look around you now. Do you have anything that you've bought that's 13 years old to hand?

It was designed by Paul Smith. Strangely it was also made in England. You don't see that very often nowadays do you?

So, it was made locally, very low clothes miles. It was designed and sold locally. It's lasted 13 years and it was very expensive. Can we learn lessons about how we're going to have to design things for the future?

I went to a meeting once where the client asked me how the long the logo was supposed to last. Three years? Two years? Longer?

I had to stop myself imploding.

I keep coming back to this Porsche quote. What if things actually lasted? What if things were designed to last 13 years instead of breaking down after two years so that you have to buy a new one?

What if fashion didn't change every season in such a military fashion? What if 60% of everything was still in use today? What if you had to pay more, a lot more, for things that lasted and didn't break and were still useful 13 years from now?

Would that be better?

Pelicans

Wow. Ace Jet 170 does it again. Beautiful photos of half Richard's Pelican collection.

Stick Figures In Peril

Another brilliant Flickr group.

1 million people x $600, I just did the math

"One million people have asked us to call when [the iPhone] is available"

AT&T (Cingular) CEO Randall Stephenson, 27th March 2007

Why I don't like Monocle

Everyone seems to like Monocle, and that's fine. But I don't.

I haven't been so excited about the launch of a magazine for sometime. I was a big fan of the original Wallpaper and Tyler Brulé was due another hit. I rushed out to buy it when it launched and brought into the office under a big fanfare.

And there it sat. Unloved and apart from the obligatory 'new magazine in the office flick through' unopened.

I've tried to think a bit harder than normal about why I don't like Monocle and I reckon I've found 3 reasons.

1. It's not the magazine I wanted.
2. It's a magazine.
3. It's not as good as the website.

1. It's not the magazine I wanted.
But then again no magazine is these days. I've always loved and read lots of magazines. When I was about 12 I used to read Look-In, Smash Hits, Q Magazine, For Him Magazine (when it was called For Him Magazine and every issue looked like a Ralph Lauren catalogue) and Vogue. I've always loved Vogue. 

That stayed broadly the same until just before university when Loaded launched. They launched with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front. Fully clothed. And no fluro anywhere.

From here on and throughout university I read a pretty stereotypical mix of Loaded, FHM, GQ, Esquire and Arena. With the occasional Vogue, Wired, Elle, Elle Decoration and Q thrown in. And of course The Face.

This was in the days when Loaded was brilliant and innovative, when FHM had (some) class and GQ and Arena still had men on the front.

As the 'lad mags' and the 'mens mags' descended into their fluro orange tit and bum hell I began to look for an alternative. Wallpaper fitted the gap nicely.

As I started work I, obviously, began to take the trade mags more seriously, Creative Review, Design Week, Campaign as well as Wallpaper, Elle Decoration, American Esquire (which is very different to UK Esquire), Fast Company and still Vogue and still Q. And of course The Face.

Then one day I got all serious and bought a copy of The Economist.

I loved it. It was simple, it was clever and it explained things in a nice way. It also had a pace about it that I liked. So I subscribed.

I read a left over copy of GQ on the plane the other day. I hated it. It felt so patronising - I was surprised at how angry I got over being told what watch to buy or what coat to wear. Obviously your tastes change as you move through different stages in your life and you don't need to be AC Nielsen to realise that the above list reflects that. Broadly speaking I was reading about my interests.

So what am I interested in now?

Design, Graphic Design, politics, greenish stuff, football (as long as it's warm and I've got a good view), the world (usual stuff like Iraq, the Middle East, Europe), being a Dad, business, running a business, what Google and Apple are up to. Technology (as long as it's the kind of technology that means I don't have to wear a tshirt with a technology logo on it) films (and I mean films, never ever DVD's), art, culture and, well, that will do won't it?

So what magazine covers all of that? None of them do, certainly Monocle doesn't. But the web does.

2. It's a magazine.
Monocle is a magazine, but it feels like a bloody Thompson directory. It weighs a ton.

(Picture borrowed from Russell Davies and then adapted by me, usual stuff applies)

I love the cover(s) and I love the black and white idea. When you open it up, bits of it are well designed. But it's still full of those horrible magazine clichés - zillions of Gucci ads before you get to the index, for example. Remember when Wallpaper used to redesign ads before they would print them?

The size really does put me off. Whereas The Economist feels light and friendly, Monocle feels like I'll get told off if I don't read the whole thing before I buy the next one.

I guess the true continuation of the reading list above is that I now get all the same information from the web. For news (political, financial and world) it's the BBC, for work I still read Creative Review but I prefer the CR Blog, Design Observer and a whole bunch of blogs.

For the odd football story there's the BBC again, but I also now look at nearly all the UK newspapers online everyday. I can also check up on IHT, Chicago Tribune and the NYT online. And so on.

So that's my magazine now. It's called the web.

3. It's not as good as the website.
Monocle has a website, Dan (not that Dan) has being talking about it for a while.

The website is brilliant. Gorgeous. Whereas I hate the ads at the start of the print version, I love the Rolex clocks on the homepage of the website. In fact it's so much better than the magazine that it puts me off buying the magazine.

Let me give you an example. On the front cover of Monocle Issue 1 is a great picture of a man in a helmet. I looked at it loads, but never wondered what it was. From the website I found out that it's a member of the Japanese Air Force.

Since the end of the Second World War the Japanese have only been allowed to have a defensive army, and now 60 years on that's beginning to look a bit out of date. Monocle travelled to Japan and interviewed various members of the Japanese army. I found that out because there was an animated slide show about the article on the website.

I could have read that in the magazine. But I didn't. And that's sort of my point really.

Never a dull moment around here 2

More flag pictures

And even more here.

Great usability or pandering to cultural ignorance?