Hasta La Ideas

An artist and professor living in Israel has been documenting the moments in her life leading up to a milestone birthday. As of today, Talia is 104 days away from her 50th birthday. We’re happy to see that moment number 152 was accompanied by issues 12 and 13.

What the US Declaration of Independence can teach designers and creatives. Or, why clients can sometimes be right

I’ve just started reading Richard M Ketchum’s Saratoga, a book about the American revolutionary war (there was a Burgoyne involved somewhere, apparently). In it, Ketchum relates a now-famous story about the drafting of the US Declaration of Independence.

After originally writing what he thought was a well-nigh perfect draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson (above) submitted it to fellow members of a Congressional committee for what we might now term ‘client feedback’. Unsurprisingly, Jefferson was worried that his colleagues would ruin his work with their helpful suggestions, a situation no doubt familiar to all CR readers.

Jefferson shared his concerns with Benjamin Franklin who, in order to reassure him, told Jefferson a story from when he was a ‘journeyman printer’.

A contemporary of Franklin’s, a hatter named John Thompson, was about to open a shop and needed a sign for it (a corporate identity, if you like). Thompson decided his sign should read ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money’. This was to be set alongside a picture of a hat outside his shop.

Then, a friend pointed out that the word ‘Hatter’ was tautologous, followed as it was by ‘makes hats’, so he took it out. Someone else commented that he didn’t need to state that he ‘makes’ hats as, so long as they were good quality, no-one would care who made them, so he took that out as well. And a third advised him to remove the words ‘ready money’ as nobody would expect him to sell on credit.

That left ‘John Thompson sells hats’, with the illustration. As his friends pointed out, no-one would expect Thompson to give his hats away, so a bit more editing was introduced. As Ketchum writes “Finally, all that remained was his name, ‘John Thompson’, and a picture of a hat.

Fortunately, as Ketchum states, most changes made by Congress to Jefferson’s draft were also improvements and history was duly made. And the lesson is, the right feedback can help improve an original concept. Sometimes.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of our readers’ experiences would be almost the exact opposite of the John Thompson story. Who hasn’t proposed their version of John Thompson and a picture of a hat, only to see assorted stakeholders stick their oar in until today’s equivalent of ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money’ becomes the final, client-approved version?

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CR in Print
The July issue of Creative Review features a piece exploring the past and future of the dingbat. Plus a look at the potential of paper electronics and printed apps, how a new generation of documentary filmmakers is making use of the web, current logo trends, a review of MoMA New York’s group show on art and type, thoughts on how design may help save Greece and much more. Also, in Monograph this month we showcase a host of rejected design work put together by two Kingston students.

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Sandwiched between Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics comes yet another reason to run amok in the streets of London: Mick and the gang are fifty. July 12 will mark five decades since a group of youngsters who called themselves The Rollin’ Stones played their first gig (at London’s Marquee), and the band tapped Shepard Fairey to create a logo to celebrate the big 5-0. The designer, a die-hard Stones fan who previously worked with Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart on SuperHeavy, says that he felt “overwhelmed” by the commission. “One of the first things I asked Mick was ‘don’t you think the tongue has to be included?.’ He responded ‘Yeah, I guess it ought to be.’ Case closed,” explains Fairey in a statement posted yesterday to his website. “I was very humbled and honored to be asked to work on the 50th anniversary logo, so my objective was to service and showcase the Stones’ legacy rather than try to make my contribution dominant.” Starting with John Pasche’s 1971 lips-and-tongue logo—”the most iconic, potent, and enduring logo in rock ‘n’ roll history,” according to Fairey—he played with ways to creatively and memorably integrate the number 50. Noted Fairey, “I think the solution speaks for itself in celebrating the Stones’ trademark icon and historical anniversary.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

One more from the graduating class of RCA: Marjan van Aubel, “a product designer with an inquisitive, almost scientific perspective,” presents “The Energy Collection,” a set of solar glassware that discharges through a matching bookshelf, which serves as a rather large battery. It’s a vaguely biological ecosystem: the tableware ‘drones’ gather energy during the day, ‘feeding’ the shelf, which can be used to power a lamp or charge a phone… but the real magic lies in the physics:

Within each glass is a photovoltaic layer of dye Synthesized Solar Cell. This means that the properties of colour are being used to create an electrical current. This technology was invented by Michael Graetzel at EPFL. It is a technique based on the process of photosynthesis in plants. Like the green chlorophyll which absorbs light energy, the colours in these cells collect energy.

Graetzel uses a porous Titanium dioxide layer soaked with photosensitive dye—a natural pigment extracted from the juice of blueberries or spinach. He discovered that the dye that gives the red or blue colour to berries, gives off an electron when light strikes it. One side of the glass is positive, the other negative and when the cell is exposed to light, the dye transmits its electrons to the titanium dioxide and releases an electronic current.

Sounds like pretty heady stuff; I’d be curious as to whether the technology can be implemented at scale, especially given the material advantages of the dye (as opposed to traditional silicon cells): “The glassware uses sunlight as a sustainable source of energy, but can also work under diffused light. This makes them much more efficient for use inside the home compared to standard solar panels, which only work in direct sunlight and are not suitable for indoor use.”

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