Noisy Decent Graphics

Pentagram at the Design Museum: Review

Down to the Design Museum last night for the Pentagram talk. It was good, very good.

Introduced by Emily King who curated the Fletcher show. The talk clumsily straddled discussing Fletcher himself and discussing how Fletcher influenced the speakers. Obviously some of the audience just wanted to hear about Fletcher and others just about Pentagram. Of the speakers, Scher easily handled this the best.

Scher kicked off the talk by giving us a lightening run down of the Pentagram partners through the years. Her 'Family of Men' diagram in pictured in the Profile: Pentagram Design book and makes interesting reading. Hard to believe now that Saville was once a partner.

The three partners (John Rushworth, Paula Scher and Harry Pearce) then spoke in what seemed like an order dictated by chronological order of meeting Fletcher. Which was sort of reflected in how they felt about him. From Rushworth who sort of considered him more of a contemporary, to Pearce to whom he was more of a hero. Scher was somewhere in the middle and probably the most interesting speaker because of this.

I like Rushworth's work (especially this for Pantone and this for the Waterways Trust) but he was the speaker I liked the least. I suppose it comes back to bridging the 'Flecther's work / my work thing'. He did remind us all of Fletcher's brilliant quote, "Stroking a cliché until it purrs like a metaphor".

As I've said Scher handled the brief the best. For example, she mentioned how much she loved these gates and how that had made her realise that typography could become architecture.

She then showed us some great, dramtic work inside Bloomberg and of course this.

Do you see what I mean about the 'Flecther's work / my work thing'? Scher made lots of nice little connections like that.

She told us how Fletcher (and his personal work) had inspired her to keep doing personal work and how he had pushed these wonderful maps.

Harry Pearce has just become a Pentagram partner and didn't seem to show much work.

He had lots of charming tales about Fletcher, especially the one about the flip flops, I love that. One summer Pearce turned up at Fletcher's house. It was a hot day and Pearce was wearing flip flops. The first thing Fletcher said, before hello, was 'Fuck. Your shoes have fallen off'. Brilliant.

I don't know if Pearce wasn't allowed to show previous work (I doubt it) or if he didn't feel it was appropriate (he shouldn't have worried) but he kept showing these little word puns.

They're very nice and everything, but I found them a bit, dunno, lightweight? What do you think? This one is Freudian Slip. Clever? Stroking a cliché until it purrs like a metaphor?

Pearce also showed these photographs of signs which are great. Really good fun.

Again there was a great story attached. Pearce had taken two photographs (the other being AVENUE ROAD) and he showed them to Fletcher one day. Fletcher loved them and encouraged Pearce to go and take some more. Which he didn't. Fletcher kept asking about the photos and Pearce would reply that they were coming along fine.

When he was wrting Smile In The Mind Fletcher rang Pearce and asked for all the photographs he'd been collecting. Pearce revealed the truth - he only had the original two. Well, replied Fletcher, in that case you've got 3 weeks to get a double page spreads worth.

I'm never sure what I think about Lippa Pearce, and now Harry Pearce and Domninic Lippa. They've always done great work but there's something I can't but my fingers on. Whilst the puns left me a little cold, this poster by Pearce is one of the best bits of graphic design in the last 10 years.

Powerful, simple, dramatic, clever and touching. The image is perfect, the typography is spot on, the message is clear and the effect is stunning.

Anyway. Afterwards there were questions. I've said it before and I'll say it again. A question is usually a sentence followed by a question mark, Not a long rambling paragraph wihich ends in a CV. Stand up Nico.

There were only three questions, one by Nico and two by us. Did no-one else have any questions? Really? Miserable fuckers.

I asked why Pentagram's obviously successful structure hadn't been copied by more design firms?

Rushworth answered that money was the main factor. In effect existing partners let new partners join an already successful company without any goodwill payment which would be an anathema to most businessmen.

Abbott Miller, Lisa Strausfeld and (I think) Domenic Lippa were also in the audience. Strausfeld said that a company called Base Design (anyone heard of them?) had the same structure.

Scher thought that many partners makes for better decision making. Traditional firms with two or three partners can often spend their time fighting against each other. More partners equals more democracy and more equality. She said she thought 5 partners was a good number for a design consultancy which was hilarious as we have 5 equal partners. We thought it was hilarious anyway, not sure anyone else in the audience did.

And that was it.

Good, very good. But then I expected it to be. I suspect the D&AD one will be very different and I hope there are more questions.

Pentagram tickets going spare

Dannyboy has very kindly offered two Pentagram tickets for tonight, for free. More here.

Feedback

(This gorgeous picture is from Orhan and used with great thanks.)

There's a Pentagram talk down at the Design Museum tomorrow night.

Harry Pearce, John Rushworth and (is this a bit of a coup?) Paula Scher will all be in attendance.

I know that tickets were in short supply and I know that many of you reading this live outside London. So I will lovingly file a full, in depth NDG report sometime over the weekend. No need to thank me.

Whilst we're talking about talks I want to mention a few others that may be of interest you. Shall I list them?

1. Some cracking ones coming up at the D&AD this spring. Pentagram (again but with more partners), Vince Frost, Wim Crouwel and Mr W + Mr K. Book your tickets now. I mean that, I always leave these things too late and then get cross with my bad self when I find they're sold out.

2. The D&AD are also hosting something called The Branding and Environmental Issues Forum which sounds like a bloody Haymarket conference but will be really interesting. Panel members include                 David Hiatt from Howies and Russell Davies. No, not that one.

3. And thanks to Richard I must mention the ever brilliant Alan Kitching who's waxing his tache down at St Bride's Library. Click here to see the best tache vs type picture you'll ever see. For those of you who don't know Kitching is up there with Fletcher.

Market Forces

So it's accepted that if we're going to stop killing Planet Earth we're all going to have to change.

Making people change their behaviour is hard. Obviously.

I think one way behaviour will change is through good old fashioned market forces. Like the way those annoying free newspapers have created so much rubbish that more bins have had to be added outside Tube stations and in shopping centres, and seeing as those bins are mainly for newspapers they might as well be recycling bins.

And therefore people might recycle other stuff too.

Cruel to be kind?

We see lots of students and junior designers here, people who've only been in the industry for a year or three. Students, graduates and freelancers.

Some of them are very good. Some of them are OK. Some of them are bad. Some of them are bloody awful. And there is the problem. Should we tell the awful ones they are awful? Should we tell the truth?

There are several problems here. First off, people give up their time and often travel a long way. Sure they want some work, but they're only seeing us because they like our work, which is great. It would be a shame if no-one ever wanted to come and see us. Secondly, most people are very nervous and could do without a critical assessment of their work. And last but not least, who's to say what's good and what's bad? Who died and made me arbiter of taste?

But.

But, and it's not very often, but sometimes we see people whose work is just bloody awful. I dread to think of these people trudging all round town and no-one actually saying what we're all thinking. Shouldn't we be cruel to be kind? In Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares the most helpful bits are always when he is brutally honest with the owners. Sometimes they just haven't realised that a roast chicken stuffed with banana is wrong. Shouldn't we be brave and considerate enough to do the same?

What do you think?

Waterless Printing

Basically printing is one of the baddest things you can do to the environment.

Someone from Seacourt came in to see us once, but nothing ever really happened. So we need to get a lot better at that.

Does anyone know of any environmentally friendly printers? Waterless inks, that kind of stuff. Marcus? Dan?

The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles

Bloody brilliant. I'm saving this link here so I can read and re-read and re-read. Via Darth Strategist's Delicious.

"The blog by a London designer offers intelligence without pedantry"

As said by the very clever people at Applied Arts Mag about this blog. ""Intelligence without pedantry" you can't argue with that as a strategy can you?

I might even get it tattooed.

Re-nourish

This looks good, although it only seems to feature American firms. Anyone know if there is an English equivalent?

Flickr Pool is going well

Some really nice stuff on there. Keep up the good work, team.

Pippa asks

"I'm from the arts institute at bournemouth and am researching inspriation for my final major project. I was hoping you could ask your graphic designers 1 thing that inspires them.

Sustainability In Design /// A Noisy Decent Graphics Series

OK. Because Lebowski sort of asked me and just because - here at Noisy Decent Graphics we are going to run a little seriesette of posts about Sustainability In Design.

Here's the first problem. Since last year I've been collecting stuff for the first sustainability post. Links, images, quotes etc. But I've now got too much.

When I write, I often save a number of random thoughts in the drafts folder until one day something happens that pulls all those strands together and then I unleash that post.

I've been doing that with Sustainability but I've got so much stuff there's no way it will ever form one post. So instead, I'm just going to fire all these random thoughts at you, at random. Some will be like half-posts, some will be like two-posts-in-one. You'll get the hang of it.

Here's problem number two. Normally a post (or an article or a story or an argument) has a beginning, a middle and an end. If you've ever tried writing about sustainability you'll quickly find that there is no end. There are no answers. I can't complain about over zealous packaging and then come to a neat conclusion. There are no conclusions. Some of the greatest minds of our time are trying to find answers, so I wouldn't worry too much, just expect a few posts that don't wrap up quite so neatly.

Problem number three. Please note that sustainability does not mean painting everything green and walking to work on your hands humming Tubular Bells. Sustainability means, well, being sustainable. Taking and giving in equal measure.

Now we've cleared all that up, here's rambling answerless half-post number one.

Ladies and Gentlemen meet Lightning McQueen.

Lightning (as you may already know) is a branded, co-promoted child's toy. The picture above is what he looks like in the box. He looks good doesn't he? And that's the point.

You see the primary function of packaging these days is as a sales channel. Here's Will Awdry, CD at Ogilvy, talking in the new book about Innocent Drinks, "Innocent has shown that the heavy lifting of marketing communication can be carried out in hand-to-hand combat in the chiller cabinet". No one would dispute that. He goes on to say that Innocent sell through the packaging first and the TV last. We won't debate that here, but you get the point. Packaging is important.

That box has too look great. It has to catch the eye in zero seconds and shift units.

Here's Lightning out of the box. Looks good, goes like a dream. I especially recommend using it on a shiny floor.

Recently the Independent have been running a campaign to reduce packaging. I support the campaign and it's great to see a national newspaper taking this up.

Isn't that example fucking ridiculous? It also answers Lebowski's question perfectly. No, there is no better packing than that which nature devised herself. As so often, nature wins.

But nature won't packaging Lightning for us, and swedes don't really have complicated messages that need to be communicated across several territories. Below is all the packaging for Lightning laid out on the floor.

And here's the same photo but with the actual product in the shot.

Doesn't the car look very small compared to the packaging?

The Independent have asked readers to send in examples of unnecessary packaging and they promised they would take the complaints to the retailers, mainly supermarkets. As you'd expect they were inundated with examples. And then, about a week into the campaign, they received this letter from Craig who runs a Garden Centre in Nottingham. Here's some highlights.

"I run a garden centre in Nottingham and the demands from customers for packaging are enormous. People request boxes for items which do not even come in boxes. Any even slightly damaged packaging will render a product unsaleable. Customers are frequently affronted when my staff ask them if they require bags, as if we are trying to save a few pennies at their expense. And unless products come in glossy boxes with pretty pictures on them, they are fundamentally useless to the retailer because they have no chance of selling.

One only has to look at the success of supermarket "Finest" or "Taste the Difference" ranges to understand that customers are demanding more, better and more sophisticated packaging. Manufacturers have to make products that sell, and customers are forcing the issue by overwhelmingly choosing to buy those products which have excessive packaging."

Hmmm, he's got a valid point hasn't he? Is it a little naive to just expect manufacturers, retails and designers to reduce the packaging? I'll buy a swede in it's natural skin, but would I have bought Lightning in "even slightly damaged packaging" or is the product rendered "unsaleable"?

So what can we do? Well yes, certainly designers have a responsibility to promote solutions that use less packaging. We should all be actively doing that. People need to be cleverer about all that. Much cleverer.

Recycling will help, definitely. Below is a picture of one of two bags of cardboard from a recent kids birthday party. Isn't it a little odd that the packaging is twice as big as the person whose birthday we were celebrating?

I took that bag to our local tip to be recycled.

Can't write this without mentioning the Innocent corn bottle which is a brilliant innovation. Product of the year and package of the year awards must surely follow. What I've always like about Innocent's packaging is that they used to say, 'this bottle is 25% recyclable, we're working on the rest' and then it was 50% and now they've cracked 100%. I doubt that many companies would be that dedicated. The 'we're working on it' bit is really important.

The other morning I was listening to Radio 4, very early. They interviewed some waste expert who basically said that Britain wasn't well equiped for recycling. The council waste facilities weren't designed for recycling (obviously) and the public didn't really know what they could and couldn't recycle. It doesn't help that it varies from council to council. Here's our friend from the garden centre again.

"Even more important is to tackle the appalling record on recycling of our councils. I live in Nottingham city and get one general waste wheelie bin. When, as a business, we tried to look at ways of separating our waste and recycling things like plastic carry trays etc, we discovered that we did not generate large enough quantities to interest any commercial companies. By far and away the most cost-effective way to dispose of everything is to chuck it all into one big general-purpose skip"

Does that sound familiar?

The interviewer on Radio 4 said surely kids understood the importance of recycling and that eventually everyone will do it naturally. The waste guy said that kids were brilliant at recycling until they became 14 then they totally lost interest. He also said that he got plenty of "Guardian readers" recycling but the general public were really confused.

And somethings we can't recycle. But it's not just about recycling, it's about using less stuff in the first place. How long have you had your kettle at home? And your toaster? I bet you can count the years on the fingers of one hand. There was a brilliant discussion on Radio 2 the other day about how we don't repair anything anymore. When was the last time you had anything repaired?

And there's a fantastic article in The Guardian about how our Grandparents kept stuff for ages and ages and ages. They reused because they had to, not because it was trendy. One toaster would last them a lifetime.

"Yet what best exemplified this habit of do-it-yourself recycling (a term that didn't exist in those days) was what my father-in-law did with old shoes. When at last they reached the stage where he had to accept that further repairs were impossible, he would carefully clip out the tongues, and store them in the appropriate place in the garage. These tongues were made of strong leather, and that, he liked to explain, would come in useful one day for making hinges"

Please read the article, it sums up a lot about how I feel about waste. It's not just the obvious things like packaging, it's everything.

" 'Well, at least he enjoys his food. There's never anything left on his plate.' But that too was part of the culture. To leave food that someone had grown and someone else had prepared, and which in wartime might have been brought to Britain by sailors risking their lives to deliver it, was unthinkable."

One thing that really annoys me is the way society has accepted the built in obsolescence of so many products  these days. That's one thing designers can help reduce. Over to you, Mr Ive.

Surely we all know that it's better to Reduce, Reuse and then Recycle.

Reusing the delivery box from Able & Cole. You see, that's dead easy isn't it?

We recycle a lot in our house. Paper, cardboard, plastic, tin, batteries, glass and we've even got a compost thing. The picture above is Lightning's box in the cardboard skip at the tip, where it will soon be taken away for recycling.

What have we learnt? We need packaging. There is too much packaging, way too much. Designers can help reduce packaging. We should all recycle, but recycling is hard.

So that's the end of the first Sustainability In Design post. No answers, even more questions. I hope that at least sets the scene for this series.

The Design Disease Flickr Pool

Wow. I've gone and started a Flickr Pool.

I'm not really sure what sort of pictures will get uploaded there. But essentially, if you've got the Design Disease then upload pictures you think are relevant to the Pool. Funny bits of type you noticed on a wall, all your CDs arranged like a colour spectrum - knock yourself out.

I'm sure that's clearer to you lot than it is to me. Let's see what happens.

(How were the apostrophes in that? OK?)

Did Bill copy Jonathan?

Is Vista a copy of OSX? Errr, yes.

You've probably already seen this, but if you haven't then you must watch this hilarious video by David Pogue of the New York Times.

Making a profit and being ethical

I went to an Economist lecture at the RSA once. It was about how the Victorians started the Limited Company.

By Limited Company they meant PLC and Ltd. As in PLC which is a Public Limited Company like Sainsbury's or as in Ltd which is a private Limited company like us. The lecture highlighted that the sole purpose of a limited company has always been a legal vehicle to make a profit. That's it.

There are many other legal vehicles for doing stuff, or getting things done, in a business-like-way. Trusts, partnerships, sole traders and charities to name a few. But a limited company - that's just for making a profit. Nothing wrong with making money. But that leads you to think that all Limited Companies are set up with the main goal of making a profit. Obviously.

I preface this because yesterday I was thinking of a question for Russell's Howies thing but it coincides with some other thoughts I've been having.

I suppose we're entering an age where companies that have built their images on their "ethicalness" are reaching a crossroads. From the Bodyshop through Howies and Innocent etc. The problem I suppose is a bit like when a politician declares himself 'whiter than white', you're setting yourself up for a fall. Aren't you?

The Bodyshop tried being a PLC, Howies have sold a stake to Timberland and Innocent remain vocally independent.

Does making a play on your "ethicalness" raise unreasonable expectations in the mind of the consumer? Does it matter? What if Innocent decided they wanted to sell to, say Virgin. Not some "obvious brand pariah" like Coca Cola.

What would be wrong with that? What if they everything stayed the same, all the ethical stuff was still there, the founders got a  nice pay day and they were part of a bigger group. Anyone got a problem with that? I'm sure some people would.

I have no answers. It's just a bridge some of these new brands will have to cross.

So, my question to Howies is; The line "cardigan bay's 3rd biggest clothing company" is brilliant, charming and has served you well. Post Timberland will that now change? (And that wasn't supposed to sound as Question Time as it reads.)

Stop The Music

Helvetica and Bodoni tshirts

I've been meaning to do this for a while (about 6 years in fact) and then these comments (and this and this and this) finally awoke me from my slumber.

And so, for your pleasure, Helvetica and Bodoni tshirts now available on eBay. Helvetica here and Bodoni here.

A handy text

I got sent this text message the other day.

Handyman is an absolutely brilliant service. It's a bit like a Rent A Dad service for lazy city dwellers. They're handymen on scooters who'll come round and fix the annoying little jobs that you can't do or can't be bothered to do. Small things, like fixing a loose cupboard door, fitting a plasma screen, new lights or putting up some Ikea stuff. Things you wouldn't need a builder or an electrician for. Things you'd ask your Dad to do if he lived next door.

Like a lot of new businesses they've got loads of cool ideas. For a start they all use scooters so they can move quick. All the handymen have their picture on the website so you can see who's going to pop round - which is reassuring. They're not cheap but they're good and efficient.

I've used them before which is why I got the text message. I didn't have any jobs for them but I admit I was racking my brains. After just moving office I think 10% off is a seriously good offer.

Back to the text message. Isn't this a good idea? Let's say they have got some bookings in the area, a couple at 9am, 10am, 4pm and 5pm. Doesn't it make sense to try and fill the gaps? Such an low intrusion way to send this information out. Seeing as I'm already a customer I don't mind the text. And it's cheap too.

Good show.

Isn't that better?

The Tube gets an adless make over. Almost looks like a design studio.

Oooooh this is nice

Perfect for a grey Monday. NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual Flickr Set.

From Anne, via Richard.