JKR

As Harry Potter casts his final spell over the nation, what next for the multitude behind the scene that have all helped make the brand such a colossal success. I don’t think we need hold our breath for Emma Watson but what about the design team?

It looks like we needn’t fear for their future either. A friend of mine was looking for some pictures to decorate her new baby’s bedroom and stumbled across these prints featuring collective nouns in pictures. Being quite particular about her interior design, she wanted something that would appeal to her son but also ‘fit in’ with the overall feel of her home.

What’s nice about these prints is that they have vibrancy, life and fun to appeal to children but enough sophistication to satisfy adults too. No surprise then that they come from Woop Studios, a company started by two of the Harry Potter graphic designers.

Like these prints, the genius of J. K. Rowling’s brand is that it makes children feel more grown-up, without making grown-ups feel like children. That’s quite a clever trick.

A final note for now on the whole subject of integrated design, 360, all of that. Reading a piece by David Hepworth on record collecting in The Word, I came across this remarkably evocative description of vinyl’s packaging and ritual:

“The lovely old labels of Stiff, Bearsville, Motown and Parlophone. The inner bags advertising the company’s other fine products. The spindle marks. The legend ‘laminated in Clarifoil’…. The unsheathing of the inner bag; the slipping of the disc into the open palm; the flipping of the disc to find the preferred side; the noise the spindle makes when it connects with the hole… The ceremony of playing a record reconnects you with one of the things you used to love about long-playing records, which was the sense of communing with the immaterial world via a physical object. It’s something that most religions have played upon.”

Now, aside from men (and it is mostly men) of a certain age alphabetising their vinyl collections, so what? Well, this paragraph prompted two thoughts for me. Firstly that it describes what packaging design can be and how it can feel when it is very, very good.

But more significantly for me, this was a penny dropping moment. We keep hearing about how packaging faces challenges working in harmony with the online brand world – that it’s slow and expensive and un-limber to change in a way that a homepage is not.  But here is another perspective – packaging is the bread and wine or the statue of the Buddha – it makes all the ephemeral online or advertising stuff tangible, delivers on the promises, and gives us something from a brand we admire to fetishise. So on balance, it’s arguably the most important part of the 360 – the tangible pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Which is a more motivating way of seeing pack design than as the canvass for a new campaign end line.

A little slow off the blocks on this story, but I think it’s interesting. Pop beat combo the Kaiser Chiefs are selling their new album online, where buyers get to choose 10 from the available 20 tracks, to make a ‘customised’ album. Visitors create their own cover artwork by choosing and manipulating a set of design elements. Then they get to sell their version through the band’s site, keeping a slice of the profits.

In terms of a commodity embracing the possibilities of online product creation, new revenue streams, social media, crowd sourcing etc. etc. this idea is for me the equivalent of a gymnast executing a series of moves and coming up with a perfectly poised bow – a perfect ten.

The final flourish is that ‘celebrity’ created versions give the band plenty to talk about on a virtual chart where they are selling next to the one you might have designed. Currently, there is some debate over the true identity of someone who made a compilation purporting to be by Chris Moyles. My question would be why, given anyone in the world you might pretend to be, someone chose to impersonate this particular chubby blowhard.

So what does this site tell us? That conventional album sales are such that a band going through a patch where they can fill two albums are willing to stake their sales success on social media. That design, even in a world where few will print off an analogue version, is still key to the experience. That the days of the ‘classic album’ might be numbered, as products become less definitive in their nature. Whose  version will the band tour two decades hence?

But I think it also shows us the power of a neat idea coupled to a neat and attractive design. Having to compile and create your own album could sound like a bit of a ball ache. The way the design team have presented this concept it looks fun, engaging and hard to make a mess of. It’s kind of steam punk meets Peter Blake visually – a really nice job. The limitless combinations of cover art possible (non of which will look too shabby) is a really interesting development for digital packaging: fingerprinting your branding through a menu of interchangeable components…

Are graphic designers amongst the least romantic folk on earth? It’s a question I began to ask myself when I tried (and got hardly anywhere) totting up the number of famous designs that had been inspired by a muse. The opening of the Courtauld exhibition showcasing Toulouse-Lautrec’s design relationship with the dancer Jane Avril prompted this train of thought.

It’s not easy to say who was the more celebrated member of this partnership when both were in their pomp. Her performances of the Quadrille at the Moulin Rouge made her famous, but it’s her trademark move with the left knee held high which Lautrec captured and which has kept her famous down the years. Lautrec had a close relationship with her, and painted her many times. Nothing rare in the arts, where beautiful women have inspired sonnets, symphonies and sculptures through the ages. So one might reasonably imagine plenty of design work fired by the curves of a favoured beauty, or the colour of her eyes. But apparently not.

The champagne coupe glass is supposedly modelled on the breast of Marie Antoinette, and the Emeco 1006 Navy Chair’s seat was supposedly moulded to Betty Grable’s bottom. Both these are probably myths – still, those WW2 American sailors must have enjoyed the thought on their long voyages. But these are woman as mould, not muse.

The original portrait of Betty Crocker was created from an amalgam of secretaries working at General Mills. Down the years, this might explain her evolving American everywoman look. The Columbia Pictures’ torch lady has changed quite a few times since the twenties. The latest (since 1992) is based on a portrait of ‘homemaker and mother of two’, Jenny Joseph. But these are women as models, not muses.

Rolls-Royce spirit of Ecstasy is a little more romantic: designed by Charles Robinson Sykes it is supposedly modelled on Eleanor Velasco Thornton, secretary to Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. Being a toff, Montagu kept their ‘upstairs, downstairs’ affair a secret. She died on a torpedoed ship in 1915, but was immortalised by Lord Montagu when he commissioned his friend Sykes to create a personal mascot for his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. She was originally portrayed pressing a finger to her lips as a nod to their hidden love. These were clearly times when, while marriage might have been out of the question, whimsically transforming a lost love into a hood ornament made perfect sense. Sykes created the general version later for Rolls Royce, and you can read the whole amusing tale here.

Coming up to date (but with little to show for it) we designers really do seem to be impervious to our smoldering passions. Nike and Flora might carry the names of goddesses, but not much of their spirit, visually. While the use of muses is common in fashion (all those Birkin bags and suchlike) it’s pretty hard to find brands playing this game. Trendy again Champagne Perrier-Jouët has, however, appointed a muse – Rie Rasmussen. She is a Danish actress, director writer and photographer. This is the modern muse though – more a face of the brand than an inspiration which we can see through the design. Nevertheless, she has done some nice water colours for the brand – a muse who actually makes things is a neat touch.

But still, this sense of inspiration from a particular person infusing a design sensibility seems quite rare. Can you think of any better examples? Perhaps there is good reason – while the very last poster Lautrec designed was for Jane Avril, she died in poverty, having given all the portraits he gave her away to various lovers along the way. So perhaps, for both muse and artist, the whole deal is not always what it’s cracked up to be…

“Everybody needs a place to think” ran the strap line that launched BBC4. This week that channel ran a great documentary about Charles Darwin’s working methods. He had what was known as ‘the sand walk’ – a lengthy circuit around his garden where he would mark off his laps of thinking time by kicking a stone from a pile to the other side of the path. When the whole pile was transferred he knew it was time to take his thoughts inside and put them down on paper. That’s his sand walk, below.

When one looks around the typical design studio or marketing department there seems little scope for a place to think. The thinking might be fermenting on the fly in front of a screen, but I am not sure this would have done for Darwin. Apple’s ‘think different’ campaign was surely more about badging them for the iconoclastic mavericks who eschewed Windows, rather than seriously suggesting that Macs were ‘thinking tools’. You will note that none of the individuals below did their stuff in front of a computer.

So where to think? There are always brainstorms. If you are unlucky these will be conducted in a room decorated in primary colours, with some crappy novelty toys intended to engender a feeling of freewheeling creativity. Such sessions typically kick off with the mantra “there are no bad ideas today”. Perhaps, but there will be many average, fuzzy and dwarfish thoughts going up on that flip chart. And actually a few piss-poor ones.  Most designers I know dislike these sessions, because they know good thinking (eg. the original sort) will not get the space or time it needs to shine in such a bullet pointed environment. On the other hand, working as a couple can be brilliant – it opens up a rally of thinking where with the right partner you can certainly make 1+1=3. But this is about building on thoughts, not randomly ‘power dotting’ the headlines.

I once had the bad luck to be in a workshop where we had to go on a ‘Medicine Walk’. “The native Americans used to send their adolescents out into the woods…” explained the pretentious facilitator, “… where they would simply follow their feet, empty their minds and see what visions came to them. They would be gone for a week or two. Well, we’re going to do just that in thirty minutes.” What a knob.

I guess my point is that good thinking needs time and space, and should ideally not be hot-housed.  But working culture does not always allow for this – it has to be grasped and defended. My boss made a point to the company some years ago that he couldn’t care less if we all wanted to work in the park, or in bed, so long as the goods were delivered. But sitting at a desk looks so much more productive, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of remaining there. So it’s not about “we need more creative environments or schedules” but rather the responsibility is on us as individuals to make our own chances.

Having said all of which, just sitting at a desk can work too. Here is a take Rory Sutherland shared in his forward to the Design Gazette book, which seems to be pertinent:

So, it’s Friday, and it’s summer. I plan to go for a stroll in Regent’s Park.  It might look like I am loafing, but who knows, it might be the most productive half hour of my week. How about you?