No, not the rubbish film, the video which shows the Batman logo changing over all its various incarnations.

This isn’t just a geeky indulgence, it seriously shows how much variation can still be found in something simple and essentially already ‘designed’, as well as the impact small changes can have on the character of a recognisable symbol:

Video found via Logo Design Love

Ben Casey of The Chase came in to work yesterday, and instead of the usual career synopsis, which most visitors choose to relate, he chose to talk about something “more interesting”, just one project. This was to be his work for Preston North End football club, a project which he described as “the perfect self initiated project”, encompassing design, art and football.

And I have to admit, at that point I was worried, not being a fanatical football lover, and having attended the talk in order to see some great ideas-driven graphic design from a company who have featured in D&AD every year for 23 years, I wasn’t sure I was up for a lot of football anecdotes and personal indulgences.

But I was too hasty, because Ben went on to tell us how his childhood love of Preston North End football club led from him redesigning their logo and stationery…

…to actually designing their STADIUM with no prior architectural knowledge…

“…it was just working on a grid system, similar to type really…”

If you let a graphic designer loose on a football stadium, then this is what you’re going to get:

Amazing. Seats as pixels. I have to say, that football or no football, this was right up my street, and exactly the sort of thing I struggled to inspire various meeting rooms of people with for England United. It was that sort of moment when you see something you wish you’d thought of first, except it was worse, because I had thought of it, and had it discarded.

Here’s his logo for The Great Room, the stadium’s hospitality suite:

Another shot dead on target. And what about a gift bag for the ajoining National Football Museum?

Bang. A hat-trick. The crowd go wild.

The talk predictably went into extra time. Despite there being only one project to discuss, Ben’s love for it shone through and that sort of dedication to the fabric of a brief always results in special things.

I can cope with seeing my Supporter typeface disappear from the D&AD judges’ table when lovely things like this survive the cull. Phonetikana by Johnson Banks is a take on the Japanese katakana phonetic alphabet, which actually shows English speakers how to say things. I guess it works in reverse too, helping Japanese people learn the roman alphabet. It’s not new, they did it a while ago, but it did just receive a D&AD nomination last week.

It’s great. I know that because I studied Japanese for two years (an endeavour cruelly crushed by the onset of habitual brand agency overtime) and always loved the phonetic alphabets hiragana and katakana. Japanese has complex symbols, abstract Kanji which are derived from the Chinese language and pretty impenetrable at times, but they also use two phonetic alphabets, mainly for foreign language words or elements of grammar.

It’s funny, because there aren’t all the same sounds in Japanese as there are in English, reading them out forces you to adopt a comedy Japanese accent.

These katakana characters often find their way into technological things, signs and brand names. When you see things like Uniqlo or Wagamama written out in the UK, these are the letters they’re using.

These Kana fascinated me while I was learning Japanese and I still get a kick out of the fact that I can actually read them in things like manga or imported videogames. The Kanji on the other had were an uphill struggle. I’ve always wanted to spend some real time in Japan to get under the skin of it all, but sadly, design is a very hard thing to get into there as a Westerner.

Johnson Banks have quite an interest in Japan, and seem to have made the leap into working over there. The identity they did for the Sendai Observatory was beautiful…

…and the UK-Japan logo feels in hindsight like the genesis of the phonetikana idea…

Lovely. Makes me want to restart my Japanese course again. While I love the idea of alternative alphabets, I did have to pass recently on the frankly terrifying prospect of developing an Arabic version of Supporter.

If you’re looking for a book on the Kana alphabets, I recommend Remembering the Kana which helped me a lot.

Mike Dempsey came into work a couple of weeks ago to tell us about his inspirations and career. Mike is probably best known for being a founding member of CDT and also for his work on Royal Mail stamps. It’s taken me a little while to put this post together as Mike’s work isn’t that easy to find online, he seems to be a very modest chap and doesn’t often write about his own work. Even so, he was President of the D&AD in 1997 and has a fair few of those coveted pencils on his mantlepiece. He showed us some things which I’ve simply been unable to find online, so you won’t be seeing those. Sorry.

The talk took the form of a journey through his career from his earliest memories of discovering graphic design through the work of Josef Muller Brockmann to his subsequent enrolment on a local Calligraphy & Illuminated Lettering evening class to find out more. At that stage, he told us, he wasn’t even aware that there was such a ‘job’ as graphic design.

He started out designing book covers. He’d take books home from the library and redesign a better cover, just like the kids do online now. He took a portfolio of those to job interviews and found his way into work as a book cover designer. Over the years he designed covers for books and albums, as well as posters. He hungrily consumed all the influences and trends happening around him, including the groovetastic Pushpin in the swinging sixties:

“There’s nothing wrong with copying. Eventually you find your own personality but it takes a while”

These are his Fontana Modern Masters covers, a series which he simplified and based on a white background, admitting that he had even forgotten about art directing them until their recent renaissance. You can clearly see what he took from the sixties Pushpin aesthetic here.

“I’m as curious now as when I started as a 17 year old”

After founding CDT in 1979, he designed the fantastic English National opera logo:

As well as art directing the Royal Mail’s series of Millennium stamps in 1999. These subsequent ‘Sounds of Britain’ stamps show a clear influence from Apple’s iPod ads but are still lovely.

And Mike has kept working since leaving CDT, starting Studio Dempsey in 2008 to work on “projects I have a feeling for, for people that I like.” The projects have ranged from these stamps immortalising 10 British albums which broke the mould (die cut to show the vinyl spilling out…)

…to this understated logo for Beautiful Books…

“Being simple is quite difficult”

Mike is an active participant in the grassroots of the industry and has some strong opinions. His entry in last year’s Type Tarts exhibition was the only piece actually highlighting the misery of sex trafficking amongst the suggestive student innuendo. His contribution to The Art of Lost Words project was a little more upbeat:

MOLROWING: n. caterwauling; cavorting (as with prostitutes)

And his response to the D&AD’s 2007 flag project was pretty clear…

The main things I took away from the talk was that Mike didn’t get any real formal training in graphic design, he didn’t follow the established route, he just got out there, started doing it and eagerly learned everything he could. That was all very reassuring. People over in the Shillington College thread take note. He’s still doing it today, getting to grips with new technologies on one of his 5 Macs, through websites some of his contemporaries have still never heard of such as Ffffound!

Also, Mike hasn’t been afraid to copy great work. Perhaps ‘copy’ is a bit harsh (although that’s the word he used himself) but learn from great practitioners and investigate their work and influences. I was reminded of a quote I heard recently:

“It doesn’t matter where you take it from, only where to take it to…”

…which seemed to fit well.

These days in between design projects, Mike travels around interviewing great designers for the RSA’s RDInsights project which is well worth a listen. there seems to be no end to his curiosity – in fact, he says that his next wish is to direct a film:

“I’m fickle, I get bored easily and I’m not afraid to make mistakes.”

And his advice for aspiring graphic designers?

“Absorb. And please don’t just hang out with other graphic designers.”

You can join Mike’s graphic journey on his blog.

Tim from Hat-trick design sent me some images of their recent Giants of Rugby project, which he must have had some sort of sixth sense about, because it was right up my street. In fact, it’s very similar to something I’ve done for another sport-related project, but I’m not allowed to show you yet. I loved it when I saw it recently at their Typographic Circle talk, but couldn’t find much evidence of it online.

Anyway, as it’s Hat-trick, it’s pretty self explanatory. The giants of Rugby, made from little Rugby shirt icons, and printed at massive scale at Twickenham Stadium.

Which reminds me, their identity for the stadium itself was lovely too…

Apparently, Rugby is like footyball, but you’re allowed to pick the ball up and hit people.

We were treated to a visit by Storm Thorgerson last week, album cover design legend and, as it turns out, very entertaining guy. Storm’s portfolio is overwhelming, famous for working with Pink Floyd and creating arguably the most iconic album cover of all time in Dark Side of the Moon, but has since worked with bands as diverse as Anthrax, Muse, The Offspring, Audioslave and Biffy Clyro. He admits he doesn’t always like the music, but that’s mainly because he often has to listen to it repeatedly during the design of the artwork. Storm told us that he was going to “show pictures, tell you how I did them, or what I was trying to do.” which worked for me. He also said at one point:

“I wouldn’t buy a record for it’s cover, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to.”

…which was fantastic and kind of set the tone of the evening. He split his work into sections, which rather suspiciously spelled out his name…

S is for Sets & Scupltures

“If we get a chance to build something we do it”

Storm clearly loves to make stuff. The example below from Anthrax’s Stomp 442 album was never a whole sphere. Instead it was a quarter sphere, rotated and manipulated to create a composite image. Storm told us of his fascination for spheres, and the fact that “you never know what’s inside them, if they’re solid or hollow”

Anthrax ‘Stomp 442′ 1995

T is for Tales

“Things are richer with a story, so I try to encourage people to make one up, even if it’s not the one I intended.”

For the Biffy Clyro album Puzzle, Storm fixated on the fact that lead singer and songwriter Simon Neil’s mother had recently died. The figure in the foreground is in a fetal position, something which Storm associated with grief, and the missing piece is just beside him, although he can’t see it. A detail often missed is that of a figure being forcibly removed from the room, symbolic of having a loved one wrenched away. This is Storm’s own story, based on his understanding of the band and their music.

Biffy Clyro ‘Puzzle’ 2007

O is for Obsessions

“How much can you persuade someone to look again?”

Storm told us that he simply loved the idea of taking a cow and photographing it for the front cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970 album. The randomness of this delighted him “I’m lucky I’ve worked for people who don’t know any different. They didn’t know if my work was any good, any more than I did.” The cow was an instinctive idea and not over-thought, eventually ending up reproduced at huge scales incongruously across billboards worldwide. Storm’s insistence and the support of the band made sure it happened.

Pink Floyd ‘Atom Heart Mother’ 1970

R is for Real

“Design is in the doing”

The photograph for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is impressive stuff. Storm is proud that he actually set a man on fire to achieve it. Interestingly, he told us that to start with the figures were the other way round, but the prevailing wind set the unlighted man’s moustache on fire, so it was rearranged.

Pink Floyd ‘Wish You Were Here’ 1975

M is for Models

“It’s better to have something good than something shit”

Storm’s Back Catalogue is exactly that. Not a row of polite captioned JPEGs but the album covers painted on the back of lovely ladies. That’s the sort of thing you can get away with if you’re Storm Thorgerson.

It was a great talk and the man himself was very happy to talk about any aspect of his work. I decided not to mention the fact that I used to design CD covers, because those were mainly the kind of ones you find in motorway services bargain bins. Two more which he brought with him were a long term favourite of mine for Muse…

…and the newest Biffy Clyro album cover, which was frankly amazing.

Not many people make album covers like that any more.

You can see a clip of Storm talking about his work here and the poster I designed for the event here. After the talk, he even signed my copy of Dark Side of the Moon, and you can tell he’s a visual perfectionist, because he did it along one side of the prism. I liked that.