JKR

There’s a great piece in The Wall Street Journal about the rivalry between Nuremberg’s two grand old pencil brands, Staedtler and Faber-Castell. Staedtler celebrates its 175th anniversary this year – next year, rival Faber-Castell will have it’s 250th. “It’s a competition throughout centuries” says Staedtler managing director, Axel Marx. A “pencil war” over which company could claim to be the oldest turns on continuous lineage, who was first to trademark and suchlike.  The courts have been involved, but the rivalry is described as friendly (through, it seems, gritted teeth).

It’s a good example of the power brands place in their heritage. But both brands are also looking to the future – Faber-Castell positions itself as a more luxurious product (see above), Staedtler as “the technology driver”. So the brands can presumably walk opposite sides of Nuremburg’s streets and favour each other with a respectful nod.

From a UK perspective (and as someone who hales from Cumbria), it seems curious that Lakeland and Derwent pencils do not exploit their provenance better. While they might not have the aristocratic lineage of their German competition, they do hale from the place where pencils were born. 200 years ago farmers in Borrowdale used graphite pulled from the fields to brand their herd of sheep. Slap a bit of wood around this, and hey-presto, the pencil.

First mover advantage is obviously crucial, but when brands are this long established it does smack somewhat of two bald men fighting over a comb. For my money, Staedtler’s logo and bright blue colour have the recognition edge on Faber’s less coherent use of their green livery. And it’s this, not a date, which makes Staedtler the authority.

This weekend sees the first Vintage Festival at Goodwood. Created and curated by Wayne and Geradine Hemingway, it markets itself as a modern day festival of Britain. Personally I think the line up looks fantastic, but it’s another example of the increasingly self referential nature of our design culture.

The trajectory of design used to be broadly future facing: “this is tomorrow calling”. Now we are more likely to reference the past rather than search for freshly minted ideas and styles. Having all design history available online, to the smallest minutia, makes plundering the past much easier than it was twenty years ago. And the web, cast as wide as it is, is also diffusing the impact of any one design trendsetter – instead we see lots of tendrils of design, where once a few star players would have been leading the way.

Meanwhile “steam punk”, with its antiquated tongue in cheek imagining of Victorian sci-fi, is heralded as a “new” design trend. We live in truly post modern times, as the dock, computer keyboard and memory stick below illustrate.

The design eras of the nineteenth and twentieth century were clearly earmarked, but now all is a blur. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just an interesting time to be designing in. But the ethos of the original festival of Britain was recovery and progress – rebuilding a Britain of the future, boldly forward thinking compared with today’s retro approach. Have we lost our mojo? Or is there a truly progressive movement out there I am missing?

These Chevy billboards put up around the brand’s hometown of Detroit celebrate the car’s fantastic design history. Beyond the pistons and the grills, they take pride in “proper” American manly cars (as opposed to fey continental things with flower vases on the dash). Americans do this un-ironic stuff so much better than we can. They have “the beer that made Milwaukee famous”. We get the occasional sponsored roundabout if we are lucky. Yet for all the bombast, do these ads suggest a new purchase makes one part of a great tradition, or conversely that Chevy’s best days are behind it?

I’m no petrol head, but wonder if the contemporary cars lack the fins and flair of the past. When the designs that made a brand great are advertised on a billboard but not reflected on the forecourt, something has been lost. If one wants to build a great future rather than hide behind a glorious past then the awkward, impractical things which make a brand special need to be retained as well as celebrated.

While nostalgically thinking about the most disappointing packaging I ever encountered under the Christmas tree, one toy sprung to mind: the advertisements for “Super Flight Deck” and an excitingly big box primed me for some serious parent pestering in the mid-seventies. But the dynamic on-pack image fell far short of reality – a tangle of fishing wire, impossible construction instructions, and a rather lame experience once play began.

However, as this blog isn’t “I 1970” what’s my point? Only that it’s amazing how little times have changed in this particular sector. A recent trip to Hamleys was full of the same “artists’ impressions” which promise more than the toy is going to deliver. All decodable to an informed adult eye, but as persuasive to an easily excited nipper as ever. Case in point, this Scalextric pack from Amazon (nice dirt getting kicked up on the image, but an experience unlikely to be replicated on the plastic track). Next to it the box which seduced me back in the day – sharing a similar sense of over promise. Does it matter? Well, life would be dreary if all toys were packaged sans imagination or flair – the box was half the fun. I suppose being let down by a product which does not deliver on the packaging promise is a sad little lesson best learned early…but it’s surprising that while we hear much about advertising standards in such communication, the reality seems so little changed.

Charm, it would seem, is often the first casualty of a redesign. The vintage Listerine pack above got plenty of misty eyed praise on The Dieline this week from packaging aficionados wishing it was still the pack they reached for in their bathroom. It’s a strange truth of packaging that the more efficient production lines and the like become, the less idiosyncrasy and beauty we get to enjoy in our brands. They probably couldn’t efficiently produce this pack again even if they wanted to.

Meanwhile the Carmex brand has redesigned from the one below left, to the one right. A bit of online searching suggests this might be to bring the design in line with a global look and feel, and the new look is itself quite retro. But against the original it has lost the convincing and distinctive pharmacy feel which always made this small purchase feel a little bit special. Updating and rationalising brands has its place, but once you kill a piece of your heritage off, it rarely comes back (Swan matches are a notable exception, also below). And of course the Coke classic bottle is rarely seen outside of advertising, but has been prudently kept alive for just this purpose. Update and upgrade at your peril, lest future generations wonder why you lost the plot.