'The Apprentice' for Designers

Who is this man? Why, it's controversial product designer, Philippe Starck, of course.

He is, so the speak, the Alan Sugar of the product design world. Although he's a little bit more French than our Alan is. Famous for his bold and controversial designs, Starck has forged a name for himself over the last 30 years, designing the interior of the French president's house, countless bizarre chairs and a certain notable lemon squeezer along the way.




And now, sixty year old Philippe Starck, claimed by some to be the most famous product designer in the world, is at the center of his own reality TV show on BBC2. I've been saying for years that someone ought to make a program like The Apprentice, but featuring designers rather than business development magnates, senior retail managers, accounts consultants and the like. And at last, it seems that somebody else has had the same idea, and has turned the TV program it into a reality. The series started on Monday at 11:20pm on BBC2, and will run for six weeks.

The show sees twelve contestants, supposedly all talented designers, battle each other through a series of design tasks to earn... a six figure salary? No - a six month work placement with Starck.

I don't know how well the program will go down with the general public, but surely for us design students, and indeed everyone in the design world, this should be essential viewing. After watching the first episode on BBC iPlayer, I can't decide if I love it or hate it. Philippe Starck's sheer French-ness is very over the top and 'in your face', and he certainly fits all the stereotypes and pre-conceived notions that one might have concerning French designers. He takes the twelve British contestants to his School of Creativity in Paris, and their first assignment is to go to a French supermarket, and equipped with €100, pick out one product which is an example of good design, and another which is an example of bad design.

It makes for very interesting viewing. The contestants have one hour to pick their products, and then it's back to the studio for a critique from Starck and his two trusted sidekicks. Just like Alan Sugar has his Nick and Margaret, Starck is aided by Jasmine, his head of communications (although she also happens to be his wife), and Eugeni, who Starck describes as "the most talented designer in the world". Here they are look, like a giant three headed über-French design beast:



The main problem I have with the program is that Philippe Starck keeps stressing the importance of function before form, and expressing his vision for a more ecologically designed future where there are fewer pointless products, and instead, only useful products. It's a lovely vision, but it seems a wee bit hypocritical coming from the man who designed products such as these:

Philippe Starck's limited edition 'Teddy Bear Band', which retailed at £142

If you're wondering what that is, it's actually a stool. It could be yours for £3,052.

These chairs offer "a soft and comfortable polyurethane seat, without foregoing the glamour of transparency and colour!" They cost £476 each.

The 'Holly All Vase' stands at 7 feet tall, and costs £2,700

The Starck 'Gun Lamp' would be a beautiful addition to any home, for just £1,400

Despite my cynicism, I still think it's a brilliant idea for a reality TV show, and I'll definitely be watching the rest of the series to see how it pans out. I'd love to know what other's opinions are on the program...

Books + Anniversaries (Part III: Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

So the two big publishers, Penguin and Faber, both celebrated their recent anniversaries (70th and 80th respectively) by producing special, limited edition sets of books. And following in their footsteps are the lesser known publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson. They're celebrating their 60th anniversary this year, and wanted to release a special set of books to mark the occasion.

Penguin and Faber each commissioned covers from a whole different range of contemporary designers, but Weidenfeld & Nicolson went down a somewhat different route, and commissioned the powerhouse of advertising that is Fallon, to design their special set of books.

Famous for throwing bouncy balls down hills and teaching gorillas to play the drums, Fallon are a very big name in the advertising world, but when it comes to designing books, well, they've never done it before. Despite their lack of experience in this field, Fallon were keen to show that they can do more than just advertising.

“This project was a great opportunity to showcase the department’s passion for craft and design above and beyond traditional advertising briefs.”

Mark Elwood, creative director of Fallon Design (from Creative Review, August 2009)

Apparently Fallon had the entire design department and all their art directors working on the brief, so they ended up with about 30-40 different concepts for the design of the books. From all these ideas, they settled on one, and the finished design looks a little bit like this:

The full set (image from CR)

Each cover is made from raw uncoated board which gives them a great tactile quality, and provides some visual consistency to the set, whilst still allowing each book to look individual thanks to a die-cut window in the center of each one. Through this cut out shape in the cover you can see the vibrant artwork of the front/end papers, each of which was created by a different artist.

Two of the covers with the end papers visible through the die-cut windows

The full end paper for 'The Siege of Krishnapur' created by Mikko Rantanen

The set isn't perfect, I think there are a couple of weak covers in there, such as Lolita and The Color Purple, but the rest I think are great, and as a whole the set looks brilliant. I think Fallon have done a really impressive job, with a design concept just as impressive as the ones shown by Penguin and Faber, and they have shown that they are capable of more than just advertising.



Looking at the works of Penguin, Faber, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, I think the equation "Books + Anniversaries = Good Design" is fairly accurate. And I've only looked at publishers of prose and fiction. If we look further afield, specialist art and design publishers Thames and Hudson also turn 60 this year, and they too have done something special to celebrate. Not to mention Taschen, who have shamelessly been slapping the number 25 all over their books recently to mark their 25th anniversary.

I can't wait for the next set of publishing milestones to roll around and see what other great pieces of design crop up as a result.

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Books + Anniversaries = Good Design
Part I: Penguin
Part II: Faber & Faber
Part III: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Books + Anniversaries (Part II: Faber)

It's not just Penguin who have been celebrating a milestone anniversary recently. Faber & Faber turned 80 this year, and they too have been busy making some lovely book sets to mark the occasion. Faber Firsts is a set of brilliant debut novels from ten of their most famous authors, which includes 'Lord of the Flies' by William Goldberg, and Paul Auster's celebrated 'New York Trilogy'.

Just like Penguin did for their 70th anniversary, Faber commissioned different designers/illustrators for each of the covers (plus a few of them were done in-house). However, unlike Penguin, the brief was a bit more strict; Faber wanted each cover to represent a classic design from their past. Over the last 80 years they have had a very rich design history, incorporating many different styles and trends, and they wanted these new covers to act as a tribute to their past. Faber describe the set as "Landmark debuts with classic designs".

Four of the ten Faber Firsts covers which hark back to designs of the past

Each cover represents a different era of Faber's design heritage, inspired by some of their most famous and prolific dust-jacket designers such as Berthold Wolpe and Hookway Cowles. Faber's 'Eighty Years of Book Cover Design' is a treasure trove of past designs (also published this year to mark their anniversary), and just flicking through the pages of the book you can see where much of the inspiration came from for these ten Faber Firsts covers.

For example, the rough brush style of Berthold Wolpe's original Faber jackets was clearly the influence for this cover of 'Lord of the Flies', designed by Darren Wall:

Wolpe's original cover design

Darren Wall's cover as part of the Faber Firsts series

And the confident hand rendered typographic approach for the cover of Peter Carey's 'Bliss' was clearly inspired by the original cover for 'Sibelius', a music book published by Faber in the 60s:

The original

The 2009 version

Admitedly, not every single cover stands out as a brilliant piece of graphic design, but as a set I think they work really well together, and they do a great job of representing the different design eras of Faber's past. Here are the rest of the covers in the set, and a couple of comments from the designers:

	I grew up around old Faber books. In particular Bernhard Wolpe's cover designs for the books of Lawrence Durrell or the poems of Sylvia Plath. It was therefore a great honour to be asked to pay homage to part of Faber's amazing design heritage. I was given the task of designing a cover that reflects some of the very graphic, 2 colour solutions that have been produced throughout the years, particularly from the 40s through to the early 60s. My cover is a simple graphic attempt to illustrate 3 stories with 2 colours. Jonathan Gray / gray318, designer (extract from Waterstone's Books Quarterly)
	I wanted to create a very classic 1950's look inspired by the illustrations of Hookway Cowles. The style is extremely flat and the drawing almost looks as if it has been screen printed. Interestingly to recreate this flat 50's quality I turned to modern digital techniques as I could layer one image evenly on top of another without adding dimension. The presence of a Carpathian style castle on top of a mountain is intended to convey an aura of mystery and drama. The full moon heightens the sense of atmosphere and also suggests that all things can be revealed even in the black of the night. Robert Venables, Illustrator (also from WBQ)

However, Faber & Faber aren't stopping there, they're doing a lot more to celebrate their 80th anniversary. As well as Faber Firsts, they have also released a poetry collection, consisting of six books, each one featuring a selection of works by a classic poet. The works featured have all been hand picked by contemporary poets and authors, and more importantly, the covers have each been created by contemporary print makers.

The six covers of the Faber 'Poetry Classics' set

As you can see, the monochrome covers each feature some great detailed illustrations, made using traditional methods such as woodcut and linocut design. The only one I don't like is the W. H. Auden cover which lacks the detail and the charm that the others have, but in general I think this is another very nicely designed set of books. They even come sporting matching end-papers:

The matching front/end papers of the Poetry books (images from Creative Review)

And it doesn't end there. Oh no. Faber are launching yet another set of books to celebrate their 80th anniversary. This time it's the complete works of Samuel Beckett, together for the first time in one collection. They've gone for the purely typographic approach (something I usually love), typeset in a bespoke face created specially for this set of books (sounds great so far), designed by London studio a2/sw/hk (oh dear, what a ridiculous name for a design studio).

Four of Faber's covers from the Samuel Beckett collection

Unfortunately, these books simply don't excite me nearly as much as the others; I don't particularly like the bespoke typeface, nor the way that the type runs off the edges of the pages. According to a2/sw/hk:

"[Each cover] uses a bespoke cover font that comes in four weights, while the book’s title runs vertically to allow for the use of large point sizes. Parts of the titles bleed off the edges to add “tension” to the design".

From Creative Review, May 2009

Hmm, not sure about that "tension" they're on about there. There are 20 titles in total, although only five have been published so far, with the rest to follow gradually between now and Spring 2011. To see the full set of covers, head over to RobAroundBooks.

Two more the typographic Beckett covers

So that's three different sets of books specially created to celebrate Faber & Faber's 80th anniversary, two featuring some very good design, and one with some OK design. For the final part of this series I'll look at how Weidenfeld & Nicolson used a different approach to design to help commemorate their 60th birthday.

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Books + Anniversaries = Good Design
Part I: Penguin
Part II: Faber & Faber
Part III: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Books + Anniversaries (Part I: Penguin)

A small equation: Books + Anniversaries = Good Design

Everybody loves to celebrate their anniversary, and it seems that book publishers are no exception. Every Gregorian milestone is an excuse to put out a limited edition set of books to mark the occasion, and commission some great book design in the process.

For example, to mark Penguin's 70th Anniversary back in 2005, they released a limited edition set of 70 books, each book being a new text, specially selected for the occasion by one of Penguin's most popular and/or significant authors from their back catalogue spanning the last 70 years. The stories/texts themselves are interesting enough, some of them very much so, but in my opinion the best thing about the set is the design. As well as having 70 different famous authors to write the books, Penguin also asked 70 different illustrators and designers to create the front covers. The result is that almost every book has a great, and unique design.

Here are a few of my favourite covers:





The books come in a presentation box, (although it's a bit flimsy to be honest), and each spine is a different colour, so that when lined up on the bookshelf they form a rainbow gradient, something I usually despise, but I think in this case it works.



There were only a limited number of sets produced, and like so many books in Penguin's back catalogue, they have become quite a collectors item. Nowadays sets of the books occasionally pop up on eBay for around five times their original retail price.

So, Penguin marked their 70th anniversary with some great, not to mention highly collectable, book cover design, but then good design is something I have come to expect from Penguin, and I've blogged about their Great Ideas books on here before. For part two of my trio of articles on book cover design, I'll take a look at Faber & Faber and how they tackled the issue of designing a set of special books to mark their 80th anniversary.

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Books + Anniversaries = Good Design
Part I: Penguin
Part II: Faber & Faber
Part III: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Message on a Billboard

It seems that everyone and everything is making a come back nowadays. Take That started off the craze, but recently we've seen comebacks from the likes of Blur, Spandau Ballet, The Verve, Spice Girls, and even a one off gig from Led Zeppelin. Apparently 90s boyband 5ive also made a comeback, although you'd be excused for not noticing. And it's not just in the world of music that we've seen a revival of the old; TV shows like Doctor Who and Gladiators have returned to our screens, and Wispa chocolate bars are back in the shops. The latest piece of 20th Century nostalgia to return is the Wispa Gold, riding on the huge success of the original Wispa comeback, the Wispa Gold is the same thing, but filled with caramel. It was discontinued in 2003, but after a petition on Facebook, Cadbury's have announced it's return this September.

So how will they go about marketing the return of yet another classic chocolate bar? After their successful For The Love of Wispa TV/viral campaign, this time round they've opted to harness the power of outdoor advertising. Cadbury's have bought advertising space around the country, and are letting the public decide what goes on it. In their own words:

"We’ve decided to give our advertising space to you guys as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown to Wispa. We've bought thousands of billboards all over the UK and Ireland so that you can share your special messages with the world. Yes that’s right, you let us know your special message and if it gets selected we will post it on a real billboard in the location of your choice."

So you simply upload your message to the Wispa Gold Messages website, and it could end up on a billboard somewhere. The idea seems very similar to some people's responses to our recent Third Space university brief, set as part of the ClearChannel Student Design Awards. I know several people on our course came up with the idea of opening up the advertising space to the public and letting them put their own pictures/messages on it.

It's a decent concept; if you include the public in the campaign itself and get them to interact with it, then they're much more likely to spread the word. There haven't been many entries on the Wispa Gold Messages website so far, but then the campaign was only launched a couple of days ago. Most of the entries so far appear to be messages declaring Person A's all-consuming never-ending love for Person B.



And there's no need to worry if you're not artistic, you can send in a plain, text-only message, and if selected to go on a billboard, Wispa's team of graphic designers will help spruce it up a bit for you by adding some lovely clip-art or some interesting typography, or maybe even both.

Lucky 'Jas' could be getting a message on a billboard from his beloved 'Harps'

Oh Glenn, you're a true romantic

An example of a message spruced up by Wispa. Look, they even added a lovely gold Wispa frame

Amongst the love messages there's also plenty of pictures of people's families and children, as well as an occasional nugget of wisdom or advice that somebody obviously felt ought to be shared with the world in the form of a 48 sheet by the side of a dual carriageway.

Someone's child dressed as young Clark Kent there

Yes, it's important when imparting wisdom to start every single word with a capital letter

Wispa have actually allocated hundreds of advertising spaces around the country for this campaign, including six 'Big Ones', presumably 96 sheet or above, and a large number at underground tube stations in London, as well as countless roadside billboards. You can see all the locations on their interactive map, and there really are quite a lot of them. Come October our streets will be flooded with messages from the public, courtesy of Wispa Gold, which could either be highly interesting, or highly annoying, although I'm sure either way it will generate plenty of publicity for the revived chocolate bar.

I just hope that between now and the beginning of October, Wispa receive some messages that are actually entertaining. After rummaging through all the clichéd love messages, and the occasional picture of someone's cat, I managed to find one message that almost put a smile on my face:

How Things Have Changed

In an old antiques shop yesterday I happened to stumble across this old newspaper from 1948, and it's fascinating to see just how different newspaper advertising was 60 years ago. The newspaper, which I ended up buying, was a copy of the Illustrated London News from April 10th 1948, and the front page contains no headlines at all, instead it is full of advertisements. These advertisements rely almost entirely on text, so the typography plays a much more important role than it does in newspaper advertising today.

The Illustrated London News, 10th April 1948

A close up of the paper's illustrated masthead

My favourite advert is the one at the top for Bulmer's Cider, the very same Bulmer's which has in recent years seen a huge rise in popularity, helped by advertising campaigns both in print and on TV. It's interesting to see that 60 years ago, they were marketing it as "Champagne Cider" or "Pomagne", clearly trying to make it sound more sophisticated. This sophisticated/luxurious image is helped by the addition of the Royal Crest, a feature which I believe does still remain on Bulmer's bottles to this day, although now a lot less prominent. I cannot however, imagine "Champagne Cider de Luxe" adorning the bottles of Bulmer's I drink down at the pub.

This newspaper is also an fascinating example of how the art of copywriting has changed. The adverts shown here use very different language to entice the customer than would be used today. Describing the customer as "discriminating" seemed to be common amongst advertisers of the time, for example in these two adverts for Basildon Bond notepaper, "Always the choice of discriminating people", and Harden's Tea, "For the discriminating".




I also love the copywriting on this advert for King Six cigars, which states "The quantity available for distribution is still, unfortunately, insufficient to meet demands". It's a reminder of a bygone era of advertising, but I think it's a shame we don't see a little more like this in newspapers today.