JKR

An apt description for this captivating light show seen on Long Acre, in London’s Covent Garden area.

Created to draw shoppers into an off-pitch side street, the lights cleverly mimic dripping gobbets of molten glass.

Few can pass by without taking a second look and then notice the boutiques within. According to shop-owners the lights exert a hypnotic pull, with many people pausing to snap them on their camera phone. “They’re a lot more sophisticated than the display in nearby Oxford Street and seem to help drive traffic into our street” comment local shopkeepers.

Design that’s worth celebrating!

By Andy Knowles, jkr.

Here, as is now our tradition, is a lovely Christmas image from the V&A collection. And equally traditional, on our last working day of the year, I simply want to say thank you to anyone who has visited and read the Gazette this year. It will be business as usual at the start of January, but over the break we will post a few festive ‘champions of design’. If you missed the link, here is the free book to read.

It seems to be a Design Gazette yuletide tradition to notice and praise Chanel No5 for their seasonal promotion. Ah well, this year’s is another great variation on the theme for the brand. I guess ‘iconic’ status, though a nice thing to have, might be a problem for a fragrance. After all, stature does not suggest ‘the latest thing’, so how does Chanel stay relevant? Aiming for classic status with classically beautiful and understated communication seems to be the answer. Presumably, the intention is to produce work of such style that the recipient of a bottle will not chastise her partner for being a little bit safe and boring. It looks like the real deal, rather than ‘not that again!’.

Anyway, I think the first image of the press ad (as spotted in yesterday’s Telegraph) says it all – the packaging (and the consistent way that the packaging is shot) are so well established that I doubt this even needs a logo. I think it looks beautiful, and is a neat way of making the fragrance and the sense of gift synonymous. The subsequent pages over-egg the pudding for me, overstating the brand’s commitment to understatement, which is a little ironic. But ’tis the season to be jolly, and it would take a Grinch to harrumph at a picture of that nice lady out of Amelié.

Anyway, as pack shots go, I think it’s a beauty and it doesn’t even feature a pack! Nice work.

We make it a rule not to talk about jkr on the gazette, in order to keep things (hopefully) objective. But today’s post is about one of design’s perks – seeing a project you are involved in coming alive elsewhere.

jkr have redesigned the Müller range of yogurts (with plenty more work in progress). Now TBWA have launched their campaign for the brand, which can only be described as a mini epic. Lots of favourite characters from our collective youth (and a few new ones) bring a little sunshine to our grey world. It will probably be used by social historians in years to come to illustrate how the doom and gloom of the downturn was combatted by a feel good culture.

Personally, I really like the witty billboard ads and the smiley rainbow whose style could probably be traced back to the very earliest Micky Mouse cartoons. It’s bold stuff, as one might expect when one of the lead clients is Lee Rolston who was also instrumental in buying Gorilla for Cadbury. Anyway, what do you think? Twitter seems to be giving it a sunny two thumbs up.

We had a little preview at jkr over Friday’s breakfast. Everyone came in wearing blue (the brand’s new hero colour). We looked like a gang of Smurfs. This might sound a little cheesy, but it illustrates my point: working in design has a brilliant perk, in getting to see how our work fits within a bigger (and big budget) picture.

It’s pretty cool seeing one’s packs in major advertising. Even cooler seeing them in most folks fridges and cupboards. This is one of the pleasures of working in the FMCG category – what we do ends up everywhere. I can never understand why design grads would prefer to work in disciplines which are arguably ‘purer’ and ‘cooler’ but where the audience is pretty much limited to a few folk similar to themselves who work in Hoxton. Packaging for household staples might mean designing on physically small formats. But the ultimate canvas is vast.

This morning Müller is all over London’s Metro, the TV and the Internet. Reasons to be cheerful I would say.

I was struck by this interpretation of the Mona Lisa by Gary Andrew Clarke – while remixed down to 140 exact circular dots it still has a familiarity, despite being very abstracted.

I wondered how many ‘iconic’ pack designs would fare if treated in the same way, so I asked the artist to road test a few. He kindly obliged and below are the results….enjoy them as ‘art’ first perhaps, then try and pick out the brands.

Below are thumbnails, where things become clearer…

And here were the original packs….

I had a few surprises – I naturally assumed Coke would reign supreme, but the slightly fiddly nature of the line and script did not survive the test. Kellogg’s though, with its more distinctive shape, fared far better. Colman’s turned out to have little left at this degree of abstraction, whereas Marlboro clearly still reads.

A couple of conclusions: firstly, the brands abstracted look pretty cool as art huh? Secondly, one would assume that putting super-bold graphics through the same filter that was applied to a murky, mostly brown, old master’s painting would leave them comparatively well placed – that this is not always the case suggests they might not all be as recognisable when abstracted as we would have assumed.

And finally, strong shapes on pack prove to offer the best chances of survival of this process to retain recognition. This is interesting if one considers that many consumers are shopping products with impaired vision and no glasses on – it’s quite an illuminating test of graphic equities in a world where packs are ‘read’ at a glance without 20-20 vision.

My thanks to Gary, the artist. You can see his excellent site (and buy very reasonably priced prints) here. Or if you are a brand manager, why not get him to convert your product into a piece of art for your office walls?