Noisy Decent Graphics

Beware the awards hunter

Talking of w+k, I remember seeing this box of old awards there about a year ago. Look what they turned it into.

 

It's called Beware The Awards Hunter.

Pentagram Austin

On Tuesday I popped in to say hello to DJ Stout and Pentagram Austin.

Over coffee DJ kindly showed me round the studio, let me take a few pics and we chatted about stuff. Topics ranged from SXSW to his excitement about the iPad and the possibilities for magazines and books We even talked about Silicon Roundabout.

He showed me some stuff he was working on including an incredible project documenting the history of the Alpine Cowboys Baseball team. A beautiful and very personal project which you will hear about when it launches later this year. It's a wonderful, fascinating, delightful thing.

I've always been a fan of these photographs, taken for the covers of Dairy Today and seeing them big reminded me of the video that went round when the magazine relaunched.

Pentagram Austin is different in many ways from the other offices but at the same time it has lots in common. Everything looks meticulously well designed. Even the dogs appeared to match the interior. How do they pull that off?

I had a lovely time, thanks to DJ and the rest of the office. And make sure you look out for that Alpine Cowboys project later in the year.

Pentagram

I went to Pentagram this morning. What a lovely office / studio / building they have. And so nice that they take the small stuff seriously, like archiving and lunch for everyone.

And like Matt said a while ago, KPI: Having a street sign.

Although...

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Ziba

Also whilst in Portland (this is turning into 'and one time, in Portland'...) I went to chat to the good folks at Ziba. They showed me around and I spoke to them about what I'm up to at the moment.

Ziba are a product design firm in working in the same area as IDEO and people like that. Probably most famous for their great work on Umpaqua bank. They also did that new(ish) Wacom Pad that everyone goes on about.

When you're a graphic designer, product designers make you very jealous. They have workshops and lathe and cutters and machines. Again I couldn't take pictures, but let me take one of this. I asked what it was and they replied, "Oh it's just resin".

It may be just resin, but it looks very cool.

Thanks to Paul who showed me around and Simon who helped set it up.

Pentagram Marks Party

I'm trying to be clever here. Well, not exactly clever, but flash. You know. I've just got back from the launch party of Pentagram's new book, Pentagram Marks: 400 Symbols and Logos.

I know that those of you who don't live in London and those of you who don't get invited to things like this love these Behind The Party Scenes posts. (Stop laughing you cynical ones at the back, I'm being serious. These posts are really popular.)

So, what's the clever bit? It's 10pm now and the party is still going strong and I'm blogging about it. It's like live blogging. But not live. Good, eh?

OK I'll stop now.

Amid all the usual tales of gossip and canapés the most interesting thing was this xylophone / z book device. A clever way of solving the near impossible problem of how to show small graphic works. 3rd year degree students take note.

 

I've been in Portland for a few days and I've a few things to tell you about that and we'll also have a review of the book coming up. Exciting times, listeners, exciting times.

Answers from Matt Dent

I guess with a name like 3 Fish In A Tree it's apt that their office should have some of characteristics of a goldfish bowl.

I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm sure there are lots of you reading this who would swap your office for 3 Fish In A Tree's place in the Oxo Tower on London's Southbank. It's a vibrant community where tourists and jewellery makers mix freely. It also means 3 Fish effectively work in a shop and anyone can look in, hence the goldfish analogy.

3 Fish's work for Allied London

From the outside I can see seven designers, one account manager and one studio manager. I'm here to meet one of the designers, Matt Dent. Some of you might remember that Matt spoke at Interesting 2008 and that he is the designer of The Royal Mint's new coins.

Matt and his colleague Chris Davies have both been promoted to the role of director at 3 Fish. This follows eight years of growth for the company; during which time they've worked for clients such as Olympus, Samsung and GB Airways.

“We are winning some great creative work at the moment against some big-hitting agencies,” 3 Fish founder Ricky Oh observes. “Matt and Chris are directly responsible for making that happen. Their promotion just recognises that fact.'

Before I put your questions to Matt, I sat down with Ricky and Matt and we chatted more generally.

Let's start with that name. In 2000 when Paul and Ricky started 3 Fish In A Tree they where searching around for a name and Ricky remembered a rhyme from Dr Seuss he used to read his son. "Three Tree / Three fish in a tree / Fish in a tree? / How can that be?" and so it stuck. 3 Fish In A Tree was born.

Matt's been with them for 3 and a half years and has possibly the oddest route in to a job as graphic designer I've ever heard. After Matt left college he travelled to London all the time looking for jobs, with no success. So he went to New Zealand for a year. When he came back he signed on. At the same time  3 Fish In A Tree had placed an ad with the Job Centre. Ricky says they got all sorts of odd letters. Lots of ones along the lines of, 'I have no qualifications but I've got to apply for this job to keep getting my benefits, that said being a graphic designer sounds like fun...' Eventually this process turned up Matt.

 
3 Fish's work for frijarc

Matt first worked on a rebrand for a firm of lawyers. That was a big project taking 3.5 years. Apparently the hardest thing about that project was the franking stamps. They kept getting lost in the post. And now Matt's a director of a 9 strong design firm at the age of 27. Ricky goes on to say, "If you're responsible for bringing in work and managing clients then you can be a director. Everyone can be a director."

We spoke a lot about Recession. They're not unduly worried by this. In what I think will be a familiar tale up and down the land there will be tightened belts but nothing drastic. They were due to expand into the unit next to them but a client just got bought out and so this is on hold. They don't see the company growing much beyond 15 people, "Stay small, do good work. Good work for good clients and stay profitable."

And then I asked your questions.

Look! Matt Dent signed my coins!

Why was the £2 coin left out of the collection/design?
It wasn't in the brief. 1-50p only. The pounds have a separate strategy that they are updated regularly, but it was but in the collection because it acted as a unifier.

Who would win in a fight between Chrissy Waddle and Cinderella ? No rules.
Gut feeling - Chris Waddle.

What other class of everyday objects would he like to give a systematic overhaul?
The thing I'd like to design above all else would be a tree house. The one constraint is that it would have to be practical; it would be designed with a particular tree, a particular set of branches, in mind. I like the idea of choosing the right spot so that some of the tree's branches shield the house from view, so from certain angles it was invisible. It would also be completely dismantleable. You wouldn't know when it was there, and you'd be none the wiser when it wasn't. I'd probably then need to design a map to find my invisible tree house.

What other concepts did you toss around before coming to and settling on the Royal Arms?
They asked for 6 designs that represented the UK, but there's 4 countries in the Union. Initial idea was a landscape, but then I realised that heraldry makes a nice mass of objects.

What has been the establishment’s response to his groundbreaking design and will he be doing stamps next ?
I would love to do stamps. The enthusiasts magazine liked them a lot. The enthusiasts (and particularly their magazine) have a lot of clout.

Why did he decide to work for that company... their website looks crap?
You should ask him why he’s working at such a dodgy company?
I think it's a good website. It's only a matter of time before 3 Fish In A Tree gets the recognition it deserves, recently we've been beating CDT in pitches, so I don't agree that it's a dodgy company.

How long did it take him to do the coin design... i.e. 3hours... 2days...?
I was involved in some capacity for 2.5 years. The first stage was to present vector drawings of the designs and then I developed it with the people at the Royal Mint. For a long time it was down to me and one other guy.

(Matt emails this extra information afterwards.) It was a design produced by David Gentleman. And strangely enough, his designs (although of different subject matter) like mine had an order to it, a sequence. His sequence was determined by the development of an oak tree, beginning as an acorn on the penny, maturing to a majestic tree by the fifty pence. Each design was supported by the elegant typography of the coin’s denomination and framed by the border of the coin. The crisp lines of the design, together with the simplicity in the arrangement of the typography gave the set a clean, bold approach. A lovely series.

Why are there no numerals on the coins?
Numbers aren't normally used. They don't have numbers on US coins, for example. The only reason you're used to seeing them is that they were put on the last set of coins because they were produced for decimalisation and it was thought that the numbers would help people understand the concept. (The coins are updated periodically. Their last major overhaul was for decimalisation which happened to be 40 years ago. These designs are likely to remain in production until the Queen is succeeded - there is no fixed timescale.).

What’s your favourite money? Other countries etc?
I liked the old Irish ones before the Euro, they had animals, fish and cows and stuff. And everyone likes the Australian notes, the unrippable ones.

What were you working on this morning?
Researching an online game for a major airline.

Tell me about 3 Fish In A Tree. Why’s it called that?
"THREE TREE / Three fish in a tree / Fish in a tree? / How can that be?" taken from the Dr Seuss book.

How many people from your BA course are designers  now?
There were 37 on my course, about a third of them are designers now.

Thanks to Matt and Ricky for a good chat and a nice lunch. If you wanna find out more Creative Review did a more in depth interview with Matt in April.

Bollocks

I was gonna write about this:

But they've already done it. They being David and AceJet and every other internet person.

Why graphic designers are like hairdressers.

More and more I'm convinced that graphic designers are like hairdressers. Graphic design agencies are like hairdressing salons.

I believe you could open a hairdressing salon in any town in Britain and you would make money. If you were sensible and kept on top of things you could make a nice living. Nice house, nice car, two holidays a year. All that.

I also believe there could be three hairdressers in this same town and they would all make money. All have nice cars. Two holidays. That's all perfectly possible.

I also believe you could open a graphic design agency in any town in Britain and you would make money. If you were sensible and kept on top of things you could make a nice living. Nice house, nice car, two holidays a year. All that.

I also believe there could be three graphic design agencies in this same town and they would all make money. All have nice cars. Two holidays. That's all perfectly possible.

You could repeat this formula up and down the country and it would still work. Just because there's already a hairdresser in town, it's no barrier to setting up another one.

Essentially all of these hairdressers will be of roughly the same quality. You could walk into to any of them, anywhere in the country, and get roughly the same haircut for roughly the same price. From time to time some of them will win awards and some of them will have good patches, but essentially, they're all just as competent.

Every once in a while one of these salons will become very well known. Famous, even. That's because approximately a couple of percent of everything will always be very good. The rest will be average. It's the same with graphic design.

From time to time some of these salons, or agencies, will go bust. Such is life. The staff move on, the good ones start up on their own, taking the good customers with them.

With the right financing and the right management a few of these salons could expand and go nationwide, maybe even international. But this will be rare, because essentially the business model isn't scalable.

According to the Design Council, 95% of design consultancies have less than 5 staff and a turnover of less than £250k a year. I wonder if The Hairdressing Council have similar stats?

Imagine a hairdressing salon pitching for your custom, how would they differentiate themselves? Could they differentiate themselves? If Bob cut your hair at British Hairways, would you change supplier when he moved to Curl Up And Dye? If The Cutting Corner was busy one Saturday and you needed a haircut quick would you chance it and get it done at Head Masters? Apply that thinking to your agency and your clients. Ever wonder why they find pitches so confusing? Worth thinking about that.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's just something I've noticed. What do you think?

Good agency website shock

I love this.

Now, there are probably people who hate it. That's fine. I like it and this is my playground with my rules.

Instead of building the usual wank agency website Modernista! have utilised the tools of web 2.0.  So the work is shown through Flickr.

Easy to use, easy to find, easy to access, easy to comment on, easy to bookmark, easy to share. good, good, good.

The About Us page utilises Wikipedia.

The best way to get what I'm on about is to take a look at the site.

Found via this month's issue of Creative Review which is also The Annual issue and very good. In the shops now.

Do all the best creative organisations end with an M?

This is the best post I've never written.

I was thinking about Pentagram, Archigram and Magnum and how they've all got similar co-operative style set ups. They're all at the top of their field. They've all got great longevity. And they all end in M, which is probably important.

So I thought I'd write about this.

But the thing is I don't really know enough about all of the organisations. So I asked some experts to write a few words on the structure of each organisation and how that helps contribute to their success. The experts don't need any introduction. A huge thank you to each of them.

You can't help but be inspired and excited by reading all of these texts.

The passion of the protagonists and the power of the collective is evident in each organisation. Investigate further and you'll see that the quality of the work is incredible and consistent.

A few things stand out for me. Firstly they all seem to have been formed out of an honest idea to create amazing work. Secondly they all seem to have come to the same conclusion about the kind of organisation which begets superior work and thirdly that structure has been copied by significantly few others.

So read the stuff below and like me you'll find yourself wanting work in an organistation that pushes the boundaries, puts creative doers at it's heart, where excellence perpetuates and which ends in M.

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Henrietta Thompson on Magnum

Magnum was a war baby. Founded by four photographers just back from the frontlines in 1947 Magnum Photos resulted from a powerful what-the-hell manifesto, and despite celebrating its 60th birthday last year, its vision is as still just as strong as ever.

Picture taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

Robert Capa, David –Chim- Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger established Magnum in an effort to change in the way photography was traded. In order to empower photojournalists to work truly creatively, without the constraints of demanding managing agents and editors Mangum made a departure from conventional practice in two ways: Firstly, the necessary staff would exist to support (rather than direct) the photographers. Secondly, the authors of the imagery held the copyright - not the magazines, so if a photographer was published in Paris Match, Magnum could still then sell the same photographs to Life magazine, say, or the Picture Post. This meant that the photographer would gain the means to work on new projects even without an assignment. More importantly, it meant that photojournalism would be recognized as the artform it was.

Picture by Martin Parr, taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

With the flexibility to choose their own stories (and to work for long as it took to get the right shot) the photojournalism being processed by Magnum was – and is still – very different to that of a photographer on commission: there is a point of view to the stories that goes far beyond the purposes of event recording. “We often photograph events that are called 'news' ," Cartier-Bresson told Byron Dobell of "Popular Photography" magazine in 1957, " Life isn't made of stories that you cut into slices like an apple pie. There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality."

Picture by Elliot Erwitt, taken from the Magnum website, usual rules apply.

Magnum today is still such a cooperative, operating from offices in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo - and providing photographs to the world’s media, galleries and museums. It is entirely owned by the photographers it represents and , if you see an iconic image of any significant world event since the Spanish civil war and are not sure who took it, chances are it was a Magnum photographer.

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Michael Bierut on Pentagram



The Public Theater, New York identity by Pentagram, usual rules apply.


Pentagram's structure is based on a few simple principals. First, the first is structured around its partners, each of whom runs an autonomous team of designers who are dedicated to working on that partner's projects. This is meant to replicate the creative intensity of a small design office, where everyone is focused on the work. Second, all of the partners are designers. There are no partners who are managers, or strategists, or account people. That means that while money is important -- the partners have to be good businesspeople, after all, since they can't pass that responsibility off -- the attention of the firm is on design, not money.

The Fashion Center information kiosk by Pentagram, usual rules apply.

Third, the partners are all equal, regardless of seniority. Finally, the partners are diverse. There are architects, product designers and new media designers along with the graphic designers, and even the graphic designers have wildly divergent styles. This means that there are many advantages in working collaboratively.

These principals are surprisingly unchanged since firm's founding in 1972. I think they've guaranteed a certain amount of stability, a longstanding commitment to good design, and slow but steady growth.

Saks Fifth Avenue Identity by Pentagram, usual rules apply.

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Dan Hill on the "Archigram - What - Organisation - You - Must - Be - Joking - Mate"


The bare facts are these. Six youngish men come together in various flats in Hampstead, London, in the early 1960s. They produce a magazine-like publication Archigram, that lasted from 1961 to 1970 (roughly), and the firm that had grown out of it Archigram Architects, lasts until 1975. 900 drawings are produced along the way, yet assessed In terms of built projects they produce only a playground in Milton Keynes and a swimming pool for Rod Stewart. If that. And yet they influence architecture profoundly. Their work is the thing, and should be pored over time and time again (see refs. below), but the question here is whether their organisational structure aided this extraordinary state of affairs.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

The 'rock group' motif attached to Archigram is a little overplayed - generally the analogy goes they were "the Beatles of architecture", a lazy comparison based around their perceived insouciance, iconoclasm and psychedelic visuals, exploding out of a then-stuffy trade. "A necessary irritant" as Barry Curtis called them. Firstly, they were of course far better than the wildly overrated Beatles. (Even musically: in the retrospective at the Design Museum a few years ago, the visitor was confronted with The Yes Album playing, from a messy mock-up of their studio, but it really should've been Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.)

Secondly, the key point of difference is that they heavily influenced without making buildings. Could a band influence as much without releasing a record? In this, they were part of a tradition of un-built but visionary work that makes architecture and urbanism almost unique in design practice. So what set them apart was the publishing.

That espoused a take on modernism informed by a generally positive reaction to the technology and media that had which emerged, with necessary inventiveness, from WWII, a conflict that was still front of most people's minds, self-evident in the half-shattered cities around them. This optimism and invention is then allied to the 'post-scarcity' culture that emerges in the late-'50s, as they cut and paste the space race onto colour telly and pop-art and planned obsolescence, spray-painting structural engineering with beat poetry and Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology', fusing Monty Python montage into avant-garde internationalist happenings in, wait for it, Folkestone. In pursuing the unbuilt, ephemeral, temporary and informational, they are precursors for a version of the 21st century (at least the one unaffected by peak oil).

Their proposals for Instant, Walking or Plug-In Cities, Suitaloons and Living Pods, were radical, fluid, malleable, intimate and transient - "tune up, clip on, plug in" into "rooms (that) expand infinitely. Our walls dissolve into impermeable mists or into the imagery of stories and fables ...".

The Walking City by Archigram. Pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

Yet their own structure remained relatively solid. If not the band, the architectural practice was essentially their recognisable model, though that is usually just as rife with splits, egos, and partners flouncing out over non-musical differences. There seems to have been little of that in Archigram's dissolution. Only that a large scheme in Monte Carlo fell through, and their fabric couldn't stretch over the distance from Folkestone to Los Angeles, which is a long way geographically but even further culturally.

So there's a disparity between their projects - "an architecture that twitched ... was responsive to people" - and their own structure. Certainly, it seems to have been fairly disorganised. Reyner Banham called them, the "Archigram-What-Organisation-You-Must-Be-Joking-Mate". But no more so than for many other architects.

The two groups of three came together to form six (three out of the art schools, and the other three working at the innovative London County Council). In a recent interview, the group's Peter Cook listed their roles:

" I was the enthusiast. Mike Webb was the genius. Ron [Herron] was the fantastically fluent member. Warren [Chalk] was the warrior. David [Greene] the poet. Dennis [Crompton] was the technologist. And I was the beaver, the operational person. Everybody overlaps, but that's the simplified version."

So we see the specialist-meets-multidisciplinary brew common to many micro firms. Though they were all essentially trained in the same master discipline, Cook points out they ranged over 10 years in age and came from different schools - "There was a hint of internal competitiveness. So it was rather like a studio in a college would be—looking over the shoulder of the other and thinking, "That's interesting, now I must do something, too."

The fact they were rarely troubled by praxis may have enabled the six-person team to remain six - to attempt to build much of what they proposed would have inevitably meant a certain fraying at the edges, as this highly complex work now tends to involve numerous specialists. Plus of course the messy necessity of clients.  Firms actually approaching their ideas in built form these days - arguably OMA/AMO, Arup, MVRDV, Foster, Rogers, Herzog + De Meuron, Future Systems, Morphosis and Atelier Bow Wow perhaps - are larger, highly diverse, often corporate structures.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

But as an ideas generator, this 6-person team of occasionally spiky, overlapping semi-specialists, unified by a single trade, medium and sensibility, was immensely productive. Given that medium was publishing, and their trade ideas, it was also immensely flexible. They took to heart the maxim, perhaps after Cedric Price, that "when you are looking for a solution to what you have been told is an architectural problem - remember, the solution may not be a building."

Cook, the most vocal member today, is slippery on who was actually in the office, doing what. But also notes that the "untidy structure", as he called it, meant they've never really stopped as well. As they transcend a firm and become more of a genre, they become less of an organisation and more of an idea.

If we can get that fluid with things, a key part of their organisation not often articulated might be the umbrella. In a sense, they were part of an un-named and equally loosely-aligned multidisciplinary movement, with Cedric Price, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, James Stirling, Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham and The Smithsons hovering over the group as some kind of unlikely beneficent chorus. Other firms or movements, such as Italy's Superstudio, Japan's Metabolists, fore-runners Team X, are also part of this scene. In this, a fluid membrane of intellect surrounded the group, through which ideas could be tested, progressed, translated or deleted.  A jellyfish-like structure comes to mind, a translucent, flexible dome of thinking, floating over a smallish core body.

This was not a formal organisation at all - barely even a movement, just partly-shared sensibilities - but enabled a rich loam for fertilising ideas, and created a purpose and direction for the work. It's difficult to see equivalents today. Might this layered umbrella structure be the important factor? They might have called it the 'organisation gloop'.

Archigram pictures from all over the place, usual rules apply.

Cook asserts "the strength of Archigram was surely its layers of inconsistent parts, keeping going a continual fascination with each other. " So within the gloop, this fascination holds the core. It's almost no more than a sudden freeze-frame on a longer timeline, a group of people coalescing around a way of thinking, as much as doing. They were a purely informational organisation, as close to media, marketing, branding, banking or academia as to architecture, as was their work.

So perhaps the essence to extract from Archigram's organisation was not in their own structure, but in the structure of the buildings they proposed - an organisation that twitches, is responsive to people; an organisation that coalesces, exists briefly, and then is gone, existing only in time; organisations that can expand infinitely, or dissolve into stories and fables; organisations in which the function can switch fluidly; organisations with a permeable skin ... Really, you could take Archigram's work and find and replace the words 'built environment' or 'architecture' or 'city' with the word 'organisation', and that would give you a truly innovative structure indeed.

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References:

Archigram
Archigram.net
Archigram [Wikipedia]
Concerning Archigram - Dennis Crompton (ed.)
Archigram - Peter Cook (ed.)
Archigram: Architecture without Architecture - Simon Sadler
Interview with Sir Peter Cook [Architectural Record]

Pentagram
Pentagram Design
Paula Scher's Family Of Men diagram / video
Pentagram Blog
Pentagram [Wikipedia]

Pentagram Publications
Alan Fletcher biog with some Pentagram history

Magnum
Magnum Photo
Magnum Blog
Magnum [Wikipedia]

Hand Written Letter Project

Do you remember a while ago, Craig from The Chase asked me to send him a hand written letter?

Here's what I sent back.

He's scanned all the responses he received and uploaded them here. He's had an absolutely amazing response. There are letters from Wim Crouwel, Daniel Eatock, The Sagmeister, Tom Geismar, Milton Glaser, Wally Olins, Aziz Cami from The Partners, Alistair Sim from LOVE, Simon From Poke,  Lewis Moberly, Alan Dye from NB:Studio, Phil Carter from Carter Wong Tomlin, Harry Pearce from Pentagram and many, many more. Have a look at them all here.

I know I'm biased, but I think our letterhead looks bloody brilliant amongst that lot.

Ethical Policy

Thoughtful have an ethical policy.

It's on the website where everyone can look at it. We bank with the Co-op and so when asked we use their ethical policy as a guide to these issues. But we don't talk about it on our website.

Does anyone know of any graphic design companies (small or large) with an ethical policy?

Whizz Mail Here

Whilst we're on the subject of WMH. They have some nice stationery.

Churnmore

How many of us have sat in meetings that started like this.

I've just finished reading this excellent book by Richard Murray from Williams Murray Hamm. It's a hilarious little tale of the rebrand of a leading 'yellow fat' Churnmore. It's cute and clever and doesn't take itself seriously. It even looks like a tub of 'yellow fat'.

No one escapes the satire; designers, ad agencies, brand experts, brand managers, innovation companies.

It's one of those books that's a little too close to the truth for comfort, 'Play Angel's Advocate' is brilliant and reminded me of an agency that I heard mention 'Crazytivity' last week.

It's well worth a read. You can buy it here. You can't borrow mine I'm afraid, I want to keep it handy in the office.

British Railways Board Environment Identity Scheme

Do you remember this post where I tried, in vain, to find out more about "the British Rail train identification system that won loads of awards and they always used to go on about when I was at college"?

David, who is good at remembering these kinda things, thought that the identity system was designed by Roundel in the 80's.

Looking through an old D&AD annual at the weekend I have finally found out the truth about the mysterious scheme! David was correct that it was designed by Roundel in 1989. Here's the full list of actors.

Is Jane Priestman related to Paul Priestman?

And here's the D&AD Annual spread.

According to the splendid C58LG website I've found out that the individual symbols were based on the major commodity carried by that particular bit of the business. They also explain that the top left of the symbols were designed to look like an F, for freight. Although the F is easier to see in the first picture above.

 
Nice aren't they? I like them a lot.

C58LG go on to say:

"The Coal sector logo (black diamonds) represents coal.

The Construction logo (blue/yellow squares) represents building blocks.

The Metals logo (blue/yellow chevrons) represents corrugated iron.

The Petroleum logo (blue/yellow wavy lines) represents the fluid nature of the oil.

From what we understand, the Railfreight Distribution (RfD) logo (red diamonds/yellow) was supposed to show the four corners of the UK, but on the other hand, it might well simply be a design not based on anything…!"

Yes, the 'four corners of the UK' is a bit tenuous.

Apparently Roundel also designed a series of Depot Plaques for each of the major maintenance depots, some based on staff suggestions. They're interesting too, but I don't really have any strong affection for them.

Another great website called DepotPlaques.com has much more information on this. Bizarrely they claim that Roundel still own the copyright to the designs which means that replica plaques "are not currently legally produced". I wonder if that is (still) true?

The scheme didn't win a D&AD award, in fact it looks as though only the 'Environment Identity Guide' made it into the Book. 1989, page 217 should you fancy having a look yourself.

Luxford Advertising

I used to work here. It was a pharmaceutical advertising agency called Luxford Advertising. It's long since gone now. It didn't go bust, the Chairman just decided to close it one day. Well, he didn't just wake up one morning and decide to close it, he put a bit more thought into it than that.

Kingsley and April once heard Paul Smith say that his dream is to one day just close all the Paul Smith shops. Put up a sign that says, 'thanks for your custom, we are now closed'.

Anyway, that picture up there used to be the Boardroom. Now it's the waiting room for Charles Worthington hairdressers. I left Luxford in 2000 and it closed in 2004, I think. There were around 25 staff and they did everything from DM to TV, but mainly print ads. The agency was based in a lovely Georgian (?) terrace that's now just round the corner from our office. When someone told me it had become Charles Worthington's gaff I wondered round for a look.

This used to be the basement. It still is a basement. It used to house two copywriters, an art director and a creative secretary.

This used to be reception. Reception was on the 1st floor (that's one above ground for my US visitors) which used to annoy the hell out of me. Receptions should be on the ground floor. Obviously.

Through that door, top left used to be the photocopier and where the nail varnish type stuff is used to sit the fax machine.

It was very odd going back. So many memories, so many visual memories smashed by CH's architect. The place looks really nice, by the way.

If you're reading this and you used to work at Luxford, leave a comment below.

The Howies Effect?

Probably not if you read this.

 

News (not quite breaking)

Bit slow to pick up on this, but Loewy have bought Williams Murray Hamm.

I know Richard at WMH and Lucy at Loewy and I can imagine everyone is very excited about this deal. WMH are one of my favourite design consultancies and this deal is a big signal that Loewy mean business.

Right. I think I need to ring Richard and Lucy...

The Story Of A Blog Post 2

I was half watching CSI New York which is no way as good as the Vegas one and half checking Design Observer which is great at the moment to see if they had linked to my No10 post like Creative Review have when I read about the RCA Secret project which made me think that I must go to that and then I started looking at the RCA website absentmindedly thinking that I'd like to do an MA one day when I probably wouldn't and then I looked at the list of visiting lecturers and I Googled Daniel Eatock thinking his site would be a load of bollocks and his site is a bit wank but actually really interesting and there's loads of good work there which is what it's all about really when I saw this Pantone Pen Print which is brilliant and so I thought I'd share it with you.

All pictures from Daniel Eatock's site. Usual stuff applies.

The first Story Of A Blog Post is here.

Our letterheads

A while ago over on we're as disappointed as you are I promised I'd upload our letterheads as they're a in a similar vain to these lovely things. A teeny weeny bit similar.

So here we are.

When we needed some new letterheads we thought about how we use them. Obviously we don't send many letters any more. We're more likely to send a note with a CD or some samples or something. In the Old Days 1.0 that would be called a Compliment Slip but decided to do a letterhead that allows you to type or scribble something short and sweet.

(click to make bigger - the photos are pretty bad, sorry about that)

We use this one a lot and it's one of my favourites. Sometimes we have to send longer letters in which case we'd use this one.

Very rarely, but often enough to print a letterhead, we may have to write something sensible and formal. In that case we'd use this baby.

I don't think you can read the text, but basically it says that you won't find any bollocks like Brandrama or Brandscape here. Just vital information like the stuff found in this letter.

Lastly we have one especially for invoices. I'm very fond of this one too.

We were trying to have a little fun with these pieces of communication. To make the recipient smile. If you can make some lonely soul in a procurement office smile you must be doing something right, right? I hope they have the same playful nature as the ones Russell refers to.

The other thing you should know is that we have no logo. Everything we do has to say The Design Conspiracy on it and it has to be clear that the 'thing' could only have come from us.

What do you think?