Where do important things happen?

About twenty minutes ago a couple of nice and friendly twenty-somethings engaged me in a conversation which followed a standard format: What are you doing with all those newspapers?

I explained.

They understood why I was reading this stuff but didn't understand why I did it here (here being the Festival Hall). "Because one might see or hear something new, you never know." They didn't really get that, so I told them a true story, one I thought would chime with them. "Things happen in the most unlikely places." I said.

In 2005 I was in South Yorkshire visiting my sick mater. Some of you will know that I'm a long-distance runner and even though a visit to most places outside London is like visiting Lilliput (no hate posts, please, I'll just ignore them) the prospect of being able to fell-run and run through countryside was gob-smacking after the tedium of the rat-run that is the Thames.

I had quite a few runs up there: Barnsley / Ilkley Moor / Wentworth / Hoober Stand / being one. That's a big run. But one day I changed the route back and ran down the A61 on the return leg and I passed a club, the kind of low-grade provincial fun-palace every town can lay claim to in a place called Birdwell, which is on the outskirts of Barnsley. As I ran by I noticed the blackboards outside advertising the 'turn' for that evening (as performers are known in those parts) and I stopped. I stopped because I was struck by the name on the board: the Arctic Monkeys. Were they a novelty act? A ventriloquist? I'd never heard of them. But that performance – their turn at being the star turn – was a turning point for them. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even further back – the late 70s to be exact – one of the blokes in the year above me on the Graphics course at Art School cornered me one day and asked my opinion about something he'd just designed. He'd been asked to design the cover for a local band's first 45. A live job! That's a big deal when you're a student. He showed it to me. It was OK, but the thing that stood out was the name of the band, it was an outfit called, Def Leppard.

So. Everyone and everything has to come from somewhere and the most surprising things come from the most unlikely places.

Some venture people just got very lucky...

Last October I wrote a post Prime for a kicking?

Dr Martens had just been taken over by an investment group and I expressed the hope that they would respect, understand and propagate the brand because of the emotional connection people have to the product. There's good reason to fret whenever a much-loved brand is taken over because its welfare isn't necessarily top of the list for some investors. Read my post Knowing your arse from your elbow.

In years to come, Primera, the new owners of Dr Martens will be talked about in revered tones and referred to as those lucky bastards because, Peter Capaldi, the new Doctor Who, has been revealed as a DM wearer. I think there will be tea parties with cream cakes in their offices every day from now on. Let's see what the Doctor also does for Crombie.

Lunch with Johnny and Sue

Eyes down...demonstrating how design works. In this case a graphic solution to road signage.

We forget how much we know. We are only reminded of how much we know when someone asks us a question, the answer to which might be blindingly obvious, but we have to remind ourselves that there was a time when we too didn't know the answer, because we forget what it was like not to know.

A quarter of a century ago in earth years, we at The Fine White Line realised that there was a need for careers information for undergraduates because there was absolutely bugger-all out there, so we set about designing something. I'd been lecturing for a long time and the difference between what the powers that be thought that students needed to know and what we knew they needed to know was clear to see and demonstrated by just about every interviewee. This, remember, was pre-internet so the thing became an A1 brochure called Whitebait and having established the tone and style of it the task of making it so was handed over to our designated writers and a succession of student placements, or interns as they are now inexplicably called.

Whitebait was funny and chock-a-block with stuff – little things that can have a big impact – like holding your book in the opposite hand to the one you shake with so you don't deliver a sweaty one. Or making sure that you go to the loo when you're waiting in reception to check for rogue bogeys, toast in your teeth or panda eyes. (The horror of finding any of the aforementioned after the fact!) To sage nuggets from industry leaders such as the dangers of telling porkie-pies in an incestuous business: don't, you'll be found out! (I should add at this point that although this is about design the same can be applied to just about any industry sector or study area.) 

In the intervening years nothing much has changed. 
I have the same conversations with school kids, students, postgrads and parents – all manner of people. Some may get lucky and get help from a clued-up tutor, or a parent or a contact in the business, but many don't. Then there's the prevailing view of the arts (since we all tend to get lumped together) as being a secondary or (in some quarters) useless activity – a Mickey Mouse degree, a degree in colouring in – one where no cerebral prowess is needed whatsoever, regardless of the considerable contribution that the creative industries make to the national GDP.

Run a search for careers advice on design and there seems to be quite a lot of it – the efficacy and value of which I leave to you to decide – although much of it seems a tad too po-faced for my liking. Official offerings come in the form of sites and films from bodies such as The Design Council, D&AD and the Government amongst others.

Design is everywhere and touches every area of our lives and so it follows that one should be able to talk about it and demonstrate it anywhere at all, so we have. My mate Johnny and I started making short videos at lunchtimes at the Royal Festival Hall. They're not big CGI ventures, nor are they meant to be. They are personal takes on information black holes and pet peeves. And that's key: personality. Design is a fun industry so why talk about it as if you're reading a mortician's rate card? There's no one view, that's one thing we do learn in college by dint of the conflicting advice we get from our tutors, so we'd quite like yours. Obviously one can't cover everything in a few short videos, but it's a start. If people watch we'll do more. If they don't we won't. If someone wants to know about something we'll do a video for them. I suppose you could call it a kind of careers surgery and that's where you come in. What do you wish that your younger self had been told? What do students need to know in your view?

If any of you would like to add something to the mix then please let me know, no matter which discipline you're working in or what the subject matter. Just send me a video (2 mins or less) plus a caption. In fact the more diverse the views the better since we all criss-cross in some way eventually, because there are no career paths just crazy paving.

Now that's what I call an anniversary!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember this?

In my last post I talked about this series in the context of the K-Tel and Ronco vinyl compilations. Unbelievably they are NOW! 30 years old. I remember the first incarnation (above) as if it was yesterday. But we're NOW! onto NOW! 86! And that makes me feel very, very old indeed.

As seen on TV!



So high-tech it makes your eye balls spin.

My last post was a dissection of a selection of the current major Yuletide ads on the box. But if you're of a certain age the BOOM! BASH! WALLOP! offerings from K-Tel and Ronco announced the approach of Christmas as concretely as the appearance of Selection Boxes on the shelves in Fine Fare. Indeed for me Christmas and K-Ronco (my 70s conflation and the one I'll use here) are inextricably linked. If these names are new to you, you can Tardis yourself back to those crazy days by dint of YouTube where you'll find a wealth of material. I promise you that It's well worth a look. 

The K-Ronco canon was a disparate one.
Vinyl music compilations were a staple and formed the early templates for the Now That's What I Call Music series. My favourites were Souled Out and Super Bad. I played them to death and scratched them to buggery and when they were no longer playable I fashioned them into a fruit bowl by holding the LP over the gas ring, as was the fashion at the time. Kitchen and household appliances offering miraculous escape from and shortcuts to everyday domestic tasks are probably the most memorable for many. Some of the contraptions were useful by degree and others were one-use only before being entombed in their garish boxes and buried in the back of the cupboard never to be seen again until someone died, moved house, had a car-boot sale, filled a bag for charity, or fancied an evening in with the Lambrusco, Abigail's Party and 'that thing of me mam's' as star turn in a pi*s-taking session. Sometimes both ends of the product spectrum collided, the progeny being the fantastically hi-tech Record Selector which was little more than a Rolodex for LPs (admit it...you want one don't you?) and millions of us bought them. And then they gave us the Record Vacuum, so we had to have one of those too. On seeing the pure magic that was the Brush-'O'-Matic, my Gran hot footed it to Woolworths and returned cradling one and it worked – in a fashion – and I remember the ad with its discombobulated hand wielding the same depositing collected cat fur on a black velvet cushion as if I first saw it yesterday.

We decided that we couldn't live without the Veg-O-Matic and pondered how we'd ever managed with only the humble vegetable peeler and that product of thousands of years of R&D: the knife. The model shown below gave way to a plunger-like version you put over your onion or whatever and then bashed with the palm of your hand. Its place in history as the architect of wrist sprains extraordinaire and the arch enemy of A&E departments nationwide is second only to Clackers or Kerbangers, as they were known in the US. They are respectively King and Queen in the that wasn't such a good idea after all Hall of Fame.

 

 

In our comparatively, impossibly futuristic here-and-now, this stuff looks like what most of us who bought it then knew it to be: for the most part a heap of tat. But it was a different world then. The ads were in no way high concept, but boy were they entertaining. They showed you the product, what it did and explained why you needed it. It was refreshing and that's what I remember about K-Ronco, probably more than I remember what they were selling. In times when TV was king – the biggest, most powerful and persuasive medium – K-Ronco packs carried the endorsement 'As Seen On TV' because to be seen on TV was an endorsement indeed. It was a promise. It meant proper stuff made by proper people. It doesn't mean that now, does it? I think that it does. Online is intangible, it's unreal because there's no reality. That's why it was always inevitable that online concerns would move at some point into bricks and mortar. Products on the box sit alongside the people and programmes we trust and they benefit from the halo. That and the common knowledge that in order to have ads on the box you need to have a bit of brass, means you're viable. You're real.

 

When I think about K-Ronco ads I'm reminded of the Dudley Moore film Crazy People in which Dudley plays an Advertising Executive who has a breakdown and revives his fortunes and sanity by creating an agency peopled by crazy people, which tells the truth and what stuff does in a very direct no-frills manner. Over the years K-Ronco has been the stuff of parody on both big and small screens and very funny it's been too. And companies like JML and products such as Cillit Bang have picked up the mantle...but from the wrong end and minus the necessary wit, charm and self-awareness. But I think there's a place for this kind of approach now, since some, naming no names, who have over-sold and under-delivered might benefit from a spot of K-Ronco. As seen on TV!

Christmas? Get real.

Christmas ads on the box. Brace yourselves and loosen your belts because the servings have only just begun and there are 41 days to go to the Big Day.

I'm already feeling the way you do at around 5.30pm on the 25th when having being told to get your ar*e off the settee and your eyeballs off the box and your ar*e in the car, you're shuttled off to 'auntie' Betty's and others who couldn't come to yours because they have their own tribe at theirs, only to find that the turkey got there before you. And oooo, look! Turkey sandwiches...yum! By the end of next week we'll be yearning for the Thompson Holiday ads on the 26th.

The one that gives me a sore head is the John Lewis Bear and Hare effort. Like the Woolworths beanos of yesteryear, theirs is the most hotly anticipated ad and has come to be (for some) the televisual opening of the first window of the advent calendar. Looking at the Woollies ad above (and the others you'll find there) it's going to be very hard for some to believe that theirs was the ad of the season, but their strategies of booking entire commercial break spots and using the biggest names around are still very much in vogue, as incongruous as it was to see a celeb earning squillions caressing a £4.99 Pifco hair dryer! But back in the hay days of  Lenthéric, that was the wonder of Woolies.

Back to John Lewis. Well crafted and scripted, it hits all the right notes and for me that's what's wrong with it. It's mawkish and, I think, a little cynical and manufactured. Was the first line of the brief make it a two box of tissues per showing ad? If so I guess (judging by the number of views on YouTube and plaudits online) they were successful but all I see is something that's had money thrown at it. It reeks of what do we do to keep on top...that's all I see. It's not a patch on 2011's The Long Wait. Or 2012's The Journey.

Another great example of more is most definitely less comes from M&S. More money down the drain than down the rabbit hole. It's little more than a showreel for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the best turn being Helena Bonham Carter who appears to be morphing into Sybil Fawlty. For all its gloss and cinematic production values it doesn't work as hard as their 2012 offering. At least it showed the products and the different audiences they're trying to reach, but this year's is little more than a vanity project for the marketing department.

And I'm not even going to waste time on Morrisons' effort because it's pants, other than to say that their reliance on Ant and Dec is beginning to grate and signals a lack of thinking at the heart of their operation.

I began writing this yesterday before Sainsbury's launched their pitch for our collective sobs and at that point Tesco was my favourite. The basic idea is not an original one but it is very nicely done and much joy is to be had in spotting the tank-top you used to wear or identifying with the scenarios shown. It's well cast and there are some wonderful micro-moments within it. But then I saw this from Sainsbury's, which is going to make that Bear fall out with his mate the Hare because he got up and got cold for absolutely nothing at all.

Both Tesco and Sainsbury's have chosen the 'real' route, staged, in the case of the former, but Sainsbury's had the sweet idea of asking customers to submit footage of their Christmases and, John Lewis, that did make me cry. It's a mirror-ball for the nation. Which of us can't identify with it? The little chap leaping around going into meltdown in his jim-jams made me LOL! and I saw my own small brother doing exactly the same thing all those years ago. The don't like it's are there alongside the I love it's. The prospect of a traditional fall-out in the offing. It happens. And the chap planning and cooking Christmas lunch with military precision only to sit and eat it alone broke my heart. But that's what happens. And then the squaddie dad returning to his totally cute and unsuspecting children broke it again all within the space of a few minutes. That rarely happens. Functional or dysfunctional, we can see through this that we're not so mad, bad, odd, not that much different at all.

Sainsbury's, you're the orange in my stocking this year.

Framestore

How it began, Framestore 1986

I had a conversation with someone I hadn't seen for a long time last evening. We talked about who was doing what and where and the changes we'd seen and experienced in the 30-odd years since we last met. One of the biggest strands of conversation was, inevitably, technology and the way it has transformed not just design but everything else, which brings me to the above.

 

My best friend on Central's MA Information Design course was a chap called, Mike McGee. His area of study was this new fangled thing called computer graphics. I had no idea what he was going on about most of the time, but, like a kindly uncle indulging a toddling niece, he never once threw me a pitying stare or called me a dullard. (Would you have dared, Mike?) He was evangelical in his belief in 'this' technology and he 'knew' that it would change everything.

 

A year or so after Central, Mike called me to tell me that he was part of a group who were setting up something called, Framestore, and would I like to design their corporate identity? (We didn't talk about brand identities at that time.) So I did. It was a literal representation. A low-tech foil to the new and cutting-edge tech nature of it. A kit of parts, which could be used together (above) or separately. It was bold, in-your-face, unapologetic and very different to anything else at the time. Just like them.

 

Back to the conversation.

My friend hadn't heard of Framestore, so I reeled-off the list of films they've worked on and won Oscars for and his jaw dropped a little. And it made me think. It's not often that you get to play a very small part in history. Get to see something grow and move from a couple of rooms in Earlham Street to Hollywood and beyond. It pulled the passage of time and change of pace into sharp focus. And it made me think about how Mike framed the future for me all those years ago, but I was looking out of a different window.