JKR

Once in a while The Royal Mail reminds us why it bothers with all those special editions. This series celebrates the best of British post-war fashion design. Shot by Sølve Sundsbø, the models strike characteristic and dramatic poses. But removing the models achieves several results: it makes the images more striking (especially against their white background), it focuses the eye on the subject, it looks wonderfully graphic even close up and it gets around that hardy perennial: “No living person on the stamp but the queen.”

All in all a very neat piece of design which acts as a brilliant example of how negative space and taking things away can really make a design pop.

They remind me of the wonderful work Nick Knight did with Peter Saville and Yohji Yamamoto back in the Eighties – which I mention simply to say that one might imagine images of clothes, where thousands of quality ones are produced each month, might easily fade in the memory. But the really original ones will stick with you. You can see Knight and Saville discuss the work here.

The passing of Beastie Boys’ MCA last week has seen plenty of creative tributes circulating. In the poster above, each dot represents a word from (You Gotta) Fight for your Right (To Party), and each dot is colour coded to represent who’s singing each word. The designer, Craig Robinson, is letting you download and print it in exchange for a donation to cancer charities. Click here.

I think the poster is ‘very Beasties’. That is to say it’s playful, knowing and as graphic as the band themselves – who, from their early ‘living Budweiser’ red and white get up to the later ‘Japanese sanitation worker fights big robot’ look, always had a particular visual sensibility.

I guess all the really smart bands do – they have a genuine perspective and personality, look like a gang as much as a group and are canny enough to hire the right talent to bottle their spirit. The Beatles must be the ultimate example, but their image, as much the product of graphic designers, stylists, film-makers and others as it was themselves, always looked effortless. I suppose there was enough natural material to work with in the first place. So while their image constantly morphed and evolved, the underlying sensibility seemed coherent all along, much like the Beasties. Spike Jonze and The Fool played their parts, but they would have got nowhere if the bands themselves didn’t know who and what they were.

This sense of having a certain spirit to express isn’t always reliant on the band’s actual image. The new Saint Etienne album (as is typical of the group) features no picture of the band. But it’s as London, ‘muso’ and charming as one would expect from them. If you like your music and your parlour games, check out the detailing in the cover design. It’s a testament to any image or persona that it can be as abstracted as this or the MCA poster, and yet still have that ‘certain something’ that adds to the groups broader ‘design world’.

What do God, Colonel Sanders and Richard Branson have in common? All are men with beards who put themselves front and center of their brand communication. One of them might not actually be a man, and none of them are officially a Colonel.

Those lucky enough to be flying Upper Class on Virgin Atlantic are now unlucky enough to have the opportunity of seeing the airlines chairman staring back at them from their gin and tonic. No, it isn’t April 1st. It apparently took a team of four six weeks to achieve this piece of ultra kitsch nonsense.

Like the ‘Hope’ blocks we covered yesterday, this is really just advertising by other means. One assumes the design’s usage will last about as long as an ice cube. But unlike the Hope blocks, I think the ‘Branson in your glass’ is a misjudged and off-putting use of brand design to sell a message. There are limits to how often we want a brand to pull on our coat-tails, especially once we have bought the ticket. What next? Does he crawl out of the on-board loo and offer to induct you into the mile high club? The cubes might also frighten the children – as my three year old remarked, “If he’s in the glass, how can he be flying the plane?”

Outside the sterling efforts of the in-house design teams for various dictators, there are very few good examples of proprietors shoehorning themselves into their product iconography. The best one that comes to mind is the sequence of walk-ons Hitchcock took in his films. From distinctive silhouettes to gags reflecting his girth (carrying a double bass, glimpsed in a weight loss advertisement) these were playful winks that brought the audience in on the joke. See the lot here.  A light touch is required to pull this kind of thing off, and that’s singularly lacking from the Branson ice cube design.

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