JKR

Two Budgens’ stores in North London are piloting a novel design: blocks of wood, branded ‘Hope’, are being sold alongside the impulse confectionary at the tills. These blocks buy you a £1 donation to the Alzheimer’s Society. Once bought the block is returned to the shelf for re-sale.

JWT’s Simon Horton told The Guardian: “We are putting charitable giving in the context of people’s everyday routines and it makes it more accessible. Everyone goes shopping and while you are in the mindset of spending money it is easy to put £1 on your bill….We are making hope a commodity. You are buying a bit of hope in the same way as you are buying your beans.”

All this in a context where UK charity donations are down, and many of us are feeling ‘chugger fatigue’ from the hectoring charity recruitment crews blocking our way into the shops.

The hope blocks are a smashing idea. To quote rival Tesco’s ‘every little helps’. They also pay back to Budgens for having the initiative to back them. The owner of the stores told Radio 4’s Today programme that shoppers had turned up early to buy the blocks “Well over a hundred people bought hope yesterday. It is capturing some imagination.”

Certainly, if one views the project simply as advertising it’s effectively improving Budgens’ profile – they are getting as well as giving. The facts here were gleaned from The Daily Telegraph. We have already quoted the BBC and The Guardian. It’s all over the web. Not bad for a few blocks of wood. On a design level, the blocks look nice and their understated nature probably fits with a sense of not wanting to make one’s donation too much of a show.

However, they could probably benefit from a bit more standout on shelf. Waitrose’s initiative over the last few years to give out charity donation tokens shows it’s possible to brand such an endeavour without looking lairy.

If it was me I would design in a bit of joy and colour. Get Sir Peter Blake to add some of his signature motifs to the blocks. But then that’s the good thing about a good idea, it sparks one’s own thoughts and captures the imagination. Nice work.

Here’s a brand that creates desire beyond reason, yet succeeds through rigorous control of its products as much as through emotional flights of fancy. A brand famous for maximalist scarves, and conversely its super simple, but highly-prized boxes. A brand continually innovating, while also remaining somehow faithful to its traditional roots. A brand with a cutting edge aesthetic yet one that your granny would love to wear. In short, with Hermès, the relationship between design and business has some inherent contradictions, but it all works beautifully.

Perhaps it successfully embraces contradiction because all its designs share two fundamental qualities: skill and art. On the one hand, this is a brand of craftsmanship, from the high-end-saddle making to the ‘hand rolled’ hems of its scarves. As with a fine Cuban cigar, one knows ‘it’s the best’. That lovely word ‘atelier’ comes to mind. Craftsmen and women in workshops using the best materials and the best (often very traditional) methods, and hang the expense.

These skills are put at the service of ‘art’ – from the stunning scarf designs to the bonkers shop windows and the ultra-contemporary homeware. In Britain we might say that quality should be known, not shown. In Europe it’s both, with knobs on. This marriage of art and craft – is this not what all great design strives to be? Eye-watering prices offered without a blink simply compound the impression of excellence.

By Silas Amos, Creative Director, jkr

A few days ago, the ‘best version’ of Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold in ten minutes for an eye watering $120m. For those of us not in adolescence or therapy it is, perhaps, a bemusingly histrionic painting. Nevertheless, its value is a result of its iconic status.

“Instantly recognisable, this is one of the very few images which transcends art history and reaches a global icon. The Scream arguably embodies even greater power today than when it was conceived” The Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art in New York told The Guardian.

But how did it achieve this? I think it’s because its emotional authenticity is so blindingly clear. Munch described himself as “shivering with anxiety” and feeling “the great scream in nature”. This is raw, not artifice – its genius is that it taps into a universal feeling and expresses it directly yet idiosyncratically.

I saw the Gavin Turk print above last night in a trendy Soho bar. It is a playful appropriation of Robert Indiana’s ‘iconic’ love painting. It’s knowing and smart, and slightly tiresome. It will never be worth a hundred and twenty million pounds, because it has no emotion. The Indiana painting might, one day, because it does.

So to drag these thoughts away from art to branding…the value of The Scream is dwarfed by the ‘brand value’ of Coke, Nike and a few choice others. Coke is joy. Nike is empowerment. They have parlayed emotion into multi-million or billion pound assets. I am not suggesting that the board members in Atlanta are as emotionally authentic as Munch. I doubt their meetings are particularly joyful affairs, or that expressing their inner joy is a formal agenda point. But I think their agencies, over decades, have on some level ‘really meant it’. Iconography is one thing. But emotion, simply, boldly expressed, is what makes us invest value in the symbolism. It takes a special kind of talent to directly express this stuff whether you are a tortured artist or a brand.

Have a great bank holiday.

Here is a box of party sweets from M&S, part of the slew of patriotic packaging for our summer of jubilee celebrations and sport. Amongst a busy crowd of red, white and blue I think it stands out as both appealing and smart. It’s one of a set of products in store, all in a similar retro style.

Part of the smartness lies in its instant nostalgia, triggered by a style owing much to Czech illustrator Miroslav Sasek’s children’s books from the 50s. It charms.

In a more general sense, the design recalls the way Union Jacks and suchlike were used in the whole 60′s Carnaby Street “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet” style that was itself playfully nostalgic way back then. So it’s kind of a nod to a nod to a nod. Certainly the copper and kid on another pack in the range recall an era before youths rioted for leisurewear.

But the real smartness comes from the pack exploiting own label’s advantage: without a brand to proclaim, the design can be very pure. It’s an incredibly single minded piece of work, its whole point resting on the appeal of the illustration, uncluttered even by so much as a boldly stated product descriptor.

Being so pure it works fantastically as a row and from the side. The neatest touch is that the sweetie packs are dispensed from a window in the beefeater’s belly.

One might argue that the pack is just a pastiche. But as pastiches go, it’s a rather good one and adds to the gaiety of our nation, I think.

The story of Australia’s imminent de-branding of cigarette packs has been rumbling on for a long time now. We talked about the potential paradox in de-branding to decrease appeal here this time last year.

The story has gained a new lease of life with the unveiling of new pack designs that go out of their way to disgust. ‘Make this as bad as you can’ is a pretty unique design brief. Do you think they have pulled it off? The olive green box has been knocking about for over a year and is supposedly the least appealing colour packaging can come in. More on this supposed box office poison here.

Using the 1985 Lucida font for the brand names must feel like a bit of a slap for the typeface. “What, you think our typeface sits right up there with detailed photos of mouth cancer and olive green? Cheers!”
Meanwhile, the tobacco companies are claiming their hugely invested in brand equities have been acquired and destroyed by the legislation.

My personal perspective is that the packs could have been a bit more unpleasant – perhaps they should smell, or be covered in an annoying sticky glue or oil? Or given an opening mechanism even more annoying than UHT milk pots? More seriously, I think the only image which would definitely put off a teenage rebel would be the cancerous mouth. Because it’s ugly and even the most rebellious teen does not want to be ugly. The stretched eye? It arguably rocks like a Scorpion’s album cover or still from Clockwork Orange (in other words, teens might like the crazy outsider status it confers. Nothing says ‘I am a teenage nihilist’ like a bit of heavy metal torture porn). And pictures of sick kids? Do they concern the average recruitment age smoker? What do you reckon – could you have made these designs even less appealing?

I guess the ‘why allow free choice, still tax the product but make it a social pariah’ issues are complex, but equally, if these designs save a few young lives they are, simply put, good design, and indeed canny politics.