JKR

The trains might often get delayed but one thing you can rely on with the British transport system is a regular turnover of identity and graphic design, much of it wonderful. Creative Review featured a set of fabulous mini identities designed by Lloyd Northover for Railtrack’s major stations in the nineties. Above is one for Paddington featuring a witty nod to that station’s architecture. Below are Charing Cross and London Bridge (with its view across the Thames)…

With successive companies managing the rail system it seems that these designs (which have always been something of a grace note on a bigger identity project) are now falling into disuse. The Beauty of Transport blog suggests that when they turn up as ephemera in auctions years from now they will be collector’s classics. (Which makes me wonder, who are the bigger nerds – train spotters or design junkies?)

What I love about the designs (apart from their elegant wit) is their existence in the first place. There was no burning need for them, but people thought them sufficiently worthwhile to invest time and money nevertheless. I find this heartening as it suggests not everything has to be about the bottom line.

Visiting the London Transport Museum a while back I snapped this train livery, wondering why such attractive craftsmanship seems beyond our reach these days. Why do all the new rail companies have such cheap looking logos and application? Are we just lazy? The Lloyd Northover designs prove that the old spirit of making a bloody effort is still alive and kicking. One hopes that whoever follows next in the ownership and rebranding of our railways will open up yet more opportunities for design to follow in this grand tradition. You might call it ‘design for design’s sake’. But if it gladdens the heart and pleases the eye, why should this be a criticism?

The poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested that if a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into a fictitious tale, the reader would suspend judgment of the story’s implausibility. He called it ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ and Bonne Maman proves his theory beautifully. We happily embrace the conceit that this jam is lovingly prepared by a grandmother at home from fruit she’s picked freshly in her garden. And there’s no question it tastes sweeter for it.

In the case of Bonne Maman, the ‘semblance of truth’ comes from the adoption of two design ingredients that signify homemade: the handwritten label and gingham cloth. Before lids were commonplace, gingham was used to cover and protect the waxed paper that would seal homemade jams. Consequently, its distinctive pattern has etched a deep association with homemade into our minds.

Bonne Maman’s use of the conventional jam codes demonstrate that it is possible to take something generic and make it your own. The brand has simply borrowed the elements and their associations then put them in a different context – in this case taken them from the pantry to the supermarket shelf.

Bonne Maman also illustrates the importance of exercising restraint. There must have been a temptation to add to the label, but it’s the simplicity and the perfect rendering of the type that make the idea easy to swallow. It would be negligent not to mention the faceted jar which elevates the brand without breaking the spell.

The great irony is that there’s now a whole host of jam makers who will only use Bonne Maman’s jars for their homemade mixture. A design so compelling it’s turned a fantasy into a reality.

By James Joice, client director, jkr

Paul Morley was on the box last night discussing the once so shocking 1913 ballet, The Rite of Spring. Have we become so jaded that nothing shocks us now, he wondered? Have we actually become nostalgic for the power of culture to shock?

Also on TV last night was a documentary about the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women. It’s well worth a look on iPlayer. Blumenfeld’s creative imagination and ability to push things was staggering. These images (he was in his imperial period between the forties and late fifties) are unbelievably contemporary. Indeed, one can see so many later photographers, from Guy Bourdin to Nick Knight, tumbling out of what he started. Below is his classic Vogue cover and a more recent ‘interpretation’ by Chanel. They are avant-garde, but they are also timeless images.

Where does this ability to create freshly minted classics lie? Perhaps with having a point in the first place. Blumenfeld idolised women and much of his work reached out to try and capture a kind of idealised and enigmatic beauty. As one commentator noted, what makes these pictures so timeless is that the images are of beauty and so are as beautiful today as they were back then. The use of white space is stunning, though most magazines today would ruin the simplicity with cover blurb. More commerce, less art.

So, returning to the power to shock in culture and design. These images were once shocking and are still amazingly fresh. But they transcend style (he referred to art directors, who provided his bread and butter, as ‘arse directors’) because they reach for something higher. They defy time because they began with a vision and a point. Bracing criteria for our own creative endeavours as we face into Monday morning…

A while ago I stumbled across a rant against pink. It was written by a mother who felt she was losing the battle against the tides of rosy cuteness bombarding her daughter. Turns out it was not always so. In the good old days, pink was for boys and blue was for girls. A quick glance at popular culture of the time evidences that blue was indeed once the visual shorthand for female innocence, beauty or virtue.

I was reminded of this in a recent workshop, when the subject of colour psychology came up. I’m referring of course to the ‘science’ (I use the term loosely) of decoding the associations and emotions that we instinctively attach to particular colours. So, yellow is warm, happy and cheery; red suggests excitement, ambition and youth and blue denotes dependability, quality and trust.

Colour psychology has been used by brands and corporations for decades to communicate something about the service or product on offer in an implicit and subconscious way. But there’s a real danger with taking colour theory at face value. For a start, the way we all make decisions about brands is much more complex than one based entirely on colour (context and culture play big roles for instance). More crucially, the more a brand adopts the rules of a category, by definition the less distinctive it becomes. So in theory, blue says all the right things about you if you’re a technology brand, but it says all the right things about every other technology brand too. Which is why situations like this are played out in every category from technology to antiperspirant:

Braver brands acknowledge the colour codes of their category and reject them – what they lose in implicit associations they gain in brand distinctiveness. What, for instance, does a synthetic, bright ‘value’ yellow, used without any depth or finesse, have to do with luxury? Absolutely nothing, which is why it’s so brilliant.

So one way of building a unique brand identity is to recognise broad cultural associations, but reject them in favour of building brand associations that only you can own. Or, if you’re a certain toy with implausible curves and a penchant for pink, change those cultural associations wholesale (blue is so 1940s) and own them entirely.

By Katie Ewer, strategic planner, jkr Singapore

This is a map of the internet, as created by Barrett Lyon and hung in MOMA. It’s really about ‘making visual representations of metaphysical spaces’. The accompanying sign gave me pause for thought: ‘(this) is one step in being able to generate movies of the internet’s activity.’

Which sparked a possibly obvious but mad thought: is the internet the first human invention that has developed beyond our ability to map, to see, to put in a box? It exists but we cannot yet ‘capture it on film’. That’s pretty heavy – a bit like how we’ve created Gods in ancient cultures yet nobody knows for sure what they actually look like.

Anyway, projects such as this are part of a wider trend to make the invisible visible. It ties to information graphics having such a huge resurgence and the strengthening relationship between science, art and design. It is also pertinent to humble branding; a way to make vague promises of corporate responsibility for example, into graspable and beautiful images (or visual equities).

It’s just a matter of finding a kindred corporate spirit who wants to visualise their soul and infrastructure – which might be more of a challenge than mapping the internet.