Do you pride yourself on your distinctive style or prefer to follow the herd where fashion is concerned? Well, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Facebook can now help you choose your wardrobe. In Brazil, C&A has rolled out a programme called Fashion Like were people can ‘like’ items of clothing on the brand’s Facebook page, then the like counts are updated in real time on hangers in the store.

In itself, the physical reflection of a digital status is an interesting twist on Facebook norm. Although the real question is will it affect behaviour? Social proof is recognised as one of six principles of social influence i.e. we look to what others do to guide our behaviour. So, in theory, people will seek safety in numbers and the best sellers in a range will be self-fulfilling.

But is your wardrobe different? Does the knowledge that a thousand other people in your town will be wearing the same top put you off or give you the extra encouragement you need?

The Levi’s Friends Store has added a qualitative dimension to the information provided. So beyond numbers, you can see who likes what – find out what your friends like, exchange ideas etc.

Somehow to me, a little extra depth gives a lot more value to the use of the technology. Whereas, the counting coat hangers feel like a bit of a fad – just because you can, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. What do you think – does it get your thumbs up?

“Too late” blared the headline announcing the death of General Gordon at the end of a spear in 1885. Set in groundbreaking 24-point on the cover of the Pall Mall Gazette and the invention of maverick journalist W.T. Stead, it arguably launched the design language by which tabloids grab our attention.

I think Friday’s edition of The Guardian also felt like a small breakthrough in the layout of newspapers. As you can see, above the fold (e.g. the bit one can see when the paper is being sold) is pretty much all picture. It breaks with two current conventions: the masthead is below the lead story and the top of the paper is not the generic set of three or four little pictures illustrating the juicier contents or special offers. It’s a neat trick because it gives this grown up broadsheet design the visual punch of the tabloids it is sold alongside. Beneath the fold all is words, as ever. It also plays to the paper’s reputation for excellent reportage photography.

Is it original? It seems like such an obvious idea that I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. But I struggle to call to mind other examples of such a layout. Moving boxes around a page to practise dramatic composition is one of the first things we were taught at art college. It was an exercise which showed the infinite variety possible from a few set elements and the different dramatic effects that could be achieved by pushing them around. The Guardian cover shows that even basic tricks like this can be re-thought and evolved to offer striking and effective design for familiar formats.

“I give classics just a little kick,” says the great man, and that pretty much sums it up, but Paul Smith is being rather modest. The kick only works because of the quality of the design and manufacture, and the kick only resonates because it has a genuine sense of spirit, rather than being something ‘bolted on’.

Paul Smith’s work feels like the output of an enthusiast – from the playful windows to the curating of various art books and objects at the back of the shops. One gets a sense of genuine pleasure being taken. You can’t fake this stuff, but when it’s real you can almost smell it. My art teacher in the brand’s Nottingham hometown was flown to Tokyo in the 80s to paint a trompe l’oeil five pound note on the floor of the brand’s flagship store. That’s pretty bonkers in purely business terms, but success can fall out of such a spirit.

The brand’s design is also about the judicious use of contrasts – those lairy, stripy colours are set off by the dark wood floors, and the flash of colour on a buttonhole is set against a basically dark grey suit. For we repressed chaps stuck with sludgy or monochrome wardrobes, all those bright stripy accessories deliver the equivalent of a pick-n-mix sugar rush to a five-year-old.

Some brands have consumers; Paul Smith tends to have fans. A case of getting back what you give perhaps? Now, if he could only give an occasional ‘little kick’ to his occasionally snooty staff, life would be sublime.

By Silas Amos, Creative Director, 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

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.