It’s no secret I’m a fan of Johnson Banks, so I won’t go on about their recent Science Museum identity apart from stating that obviously, I loved it. If you want to see more of it click here.

No, I’m writing this because I noticed something the other morning as I passed an advert in the tube station.

One of the things designers love to do is line things up. Whenever I get a new identity brief, I often size up the name of the company, looking for symmetries, interesting gaps between letters, double entendres etc etc. All very Smile in the Mind. Anyway, I digress. One thing I often do is work out it the letters will stack nicely, so I liked the fact that the new Science Museum logo does that.

4 letters, 6, or best of all, 9 letters are all a gift. Except that there are 13 letters in S C I E N C E M U S E U M, and my OCD gene means I know that’s a prime number, so it doesn’t work. And then I noticed, they’ve run the I and the E together on the first line. Clever buggers.

Normally that wouldn’t work at all, but it works so well I hadn’t even noticed it.

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.

I’m pretty pleased this morning as I just found out I’m featured on the Johnson Banks Thought for the Week. Micheal Johnson posted recently about their open-ended Time project, where they invite viewer submissions. I thought they might be interested in my mobile phone photoblog as a visual record of time, so casually sent it in, not expecting to really hear anything back. Well, Michael replied to say thanks, and then this morning the photoblog was plastered all over their blog. Nice!

I’d better get on the phone to my web hosts and plead for some more bandwidth…

Oh, and talking of Time, the February issue of All The Rage featured a couple of my photos on the subject.