JKR

Effective design does not have to be complicated. It can just be a matter of having a good eye for talent and employing it. Penguin are masters of this. Another lovely set of books designed by Coralie Bickford Smith now join the Penguin bookshelf, already groaning with many other fine examples. They beautiful demonstrate the use of pattern as design and work brilliantly as a set.

Bickford-Smith is obviously something of an expert in pattern design, and her work on a set of F. Scott Fitzgerald titles show how brilliant work can be based on a quite simple thought. These books again work as a set. They are attractive but also appropriate, using the kind of deco patterns that would have surrounded Fitzgerald’s characters. But the touch of genius is the use of gold – very much a New York deco material, but also one which evokes a certain gilded lifestyle that was so much the subject of Fitzgerald’s writing. So, great branding, that looks stunning, is appropriate and also offers a comment on the book’s tone and subject. Not bad work for a piece of pattern design and evidence that complicated strategy is not always that essential – sometimes the work speaks (or sings) for itself.

So a final thought – I think the team at Penguin are a wonderful example of how to run a brand with the mentality of curators. This means selecting talent they admire and putting it to work, rather than pitching out projects piecemeal. I’m not certain my assumptions here are correct, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if more brands were visually managed with a curator rather than traditional client mentality? It would certainly make life more fun for the clients themselves!

The book designs were found via Brain Pickings.

With the passing of Ronald Searle we lose one of our great creative talents, best visual storytellers and as many of his contemporaries would attest, the finest British cartoonist of the past century. It’s unsurprising that all the obituaries headline the work that defined him: his creation of the little monsters of St. Trinian’s and later, the semi-literate Molesworth of St. Custard’s boys’ school. Indeed, my first thought on hearing of his passing was the line he put into the mouth of light-footed weed Basil Fotherington-Thomas “Hello clouds, hello sky.” That’s him skipping below…

But, like a musician who has become doomed to only be remembered for his greatest hit, short handing Searle’s body of work to little monsters in a school setting is to miss much other wonderful work. So I thought it would be nice to share a small sample of the breadth of his work beyond the school gates…

As a POW forced to build railways in Thailand, a six stone malarial Searle would end a sixteen hour day of hard labour by following a compulsion to record his experiences, the act of which was punishable by death if discovered. The dark world he experienced is generally seen to have influenced and informed all of his post-war illustration.

Searle’s work for Lemon Hart creates a character who could be the prototype for the Pimm’s man and other such archetypes.

Two from a series of beautiful drawings he made of London characters.

A typically manic cover for Graphis.

And two lovely covers for Punch, tipping a hat to his hero Picasso.

I think it would be trite to force a point ‘relevant for branding’ into this post about Searle’s work. Although he certainly shows that idiosyncrasy of style and content are rather timeless and fashion proof qualities in visual communication.

Finally, let’s leave the last word to his work – with a page from Molesworth’s insights. Because although Searle himself felt pigeonholed by his school based creations, looking from afar, they are quite some pigeonhole to occupy.

One interesting strand in the coverage of Jonathan Ive being knighted comes from Creative Review: “It’s remarkable just how much time Jobs and Ive apparently spent together… they would have lunch most days that Jobs was in the office and Jobs would routinely spend afternoons in Ive’s studio studying models and concepts.” The coverage notes a similarity to the relationship designer Dieter Rams (a huge influence on Ive) enjoyed with various employers. “At Braun I always reported to Erwin and Artur Braun or, after their departure, the Chairman of the Board. It is the same in my relationship with the furniture manufacturer, Vitsoe, where I worked closely with the founder Niels Vitsoe and, since his death, Mark Adams.”

I wonder if there is something in this – that creativity within corporations has potentially more vitality and power than in the more typical agency/client set-up? William Golden found his place designing communications for CBS and over the years turned this job into a world-class identity system for the brand. Harry Beck basically created the Tube Map (and so a whole map-making language) around the periphery of his day job as an engineering draftsman at the London Underground Signals Office. Even after company and designer found themselves at loggerheads, Beck continued to design improvements to the map up until his death.

And perhaps it is the duration of such relationships, rather than who signs the paycheque, that counts. For example, Paul Rand was effectively the in-house designer at IBM for almost a decade. And of course the whole world of haute couture is based on a symbiotic relationship between the business heads and the design names that lead their brands. So it’s easy to find examples of world-class work that are the fruits of embedded relationships. I wonder, as today’s corporations get wise to the high return on investment that design can deliver, might we see more and more of these arrangements?

Perhaps, but I think it might just come down to chemistry, rather than an employment policy. The reason two people spend hours and days in each others company on a design project is because they have a spark. They see something in their opposite which completes and improves on what they could do alone. You can’t recruit for that; it’s the lucky bounce of fate, like Lennon meeting McCartney at that fabled church fête shindig.

The only clear advantage of a more permanent ‘in-house’ arrangement is that it allows the creatives greater permission to try and to fail (at least in an enlightened organisation). If you’re not worried about ‘blowing the pitch’ you can focus on what is really important – the work. Also, having a creative who believes they are committed to a decade’s endeavour results in a focus on doing the right thing, not just the splashy here and now thing. Finally, between these two partners there is something quite simple – a level playing field, and a sense of trust that cuts both ways.

Of course such collaborative support between project partners does not have to be the exclusive preserve of in-house design…just for the record.

So for many of us, the lucky ones, today is the first working day of 2012. Above is Ford Madox Brown’s painting ‘Work’ which depicts road digging in Victorian Hampstead, or an upheaval that effects all strata of society, depending on how deep you want to look. No particular reason to use it here, other than that its title chimes with the subject of today’s post and that it’s a painting worth sharing.

Anyway, even in the ‘creative industries’ coming back into work can feel a little like returning to one’s toil. Albeit without much physical exertion. All those briefs that came in just before Christmas that we have been trying to studiously ignore for a few days now need attending to. So I wanted to share a few lines from the new biography of David Hockney (A Rake’s Progress), which illustrate his working ethic in the early sixties:

“When I moved to Powis Terrace” he remembers, “the biggest room was where I painted, and I had my little bed in the corner. At the end of the bed was a chest of drawers on which I painted a message rather carefully that said in large capital letters ‘GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY’. So the first thing I saw every morning was the sign, and not only did I read the sign but I remembered that I had wasted two hours painting it, so I jumped out of bed.”

As I pass this on, I note that in our line of work we are so lucky. 2012 presents us with a blank sketchbook and a brace of sharp pencils. It’s up to us what we do with them and that’s rather an exciting prospect. Have a happy and productive new year.

It’s possible that you’re reading this wearing your ‘Christmas jumper’. Only this year, it might be more out of choice than duty. Thanks to a little help from the BBC’s ‘Consider yourself’ idents, a former festive faux pas is fast becoming seasonal chic.

Making something inherently cringeworthy look appealing takes some doing. Although it’s probably fair to say that some of the BBC’s personalities do it more effectively than others – Michael McIntyre still looks more geek to Tess Daley’s chic. There is a real innocence to the design of the jumpers that makes the whole ident concept more believable. That’s because they are the genuine article. They were all hand-knitted in Wales by David & Judith Fitchie from The Christmas Jumper Shop who said they had “been knitting 18 hours a day” to meet the demand that followed.

The idents are representative of a broader renaissance for knitting which has been casting off (sorry) its traditional associations on the back of celebrity backers, groups for young knitters such as Stitch ‘n Bitch, and websites like Knitty and Knit on the Net. Sales of yarn are up significantly on last year and Google UK say that online searches for knitting-related terms have increased over 150%.

Also, since The Killing became the last word in box sets on Scandinavian murders, the lead character’s jumper has become an ironic/iconic wooly gift of choice!

All good reason to wear this year’s Christmas jumper rather than stick it straight in the bottom drawer. But what do you think? Will you be wearing yours?

By James Joice, jkr.