Hasta La Ideas

You may not know his name but you will certainly know his work: Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) designs and makes signs for most of the fried chicken shops in the UK. In an extract from her book Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie, Siâron Hughes meets him

Siâron: Could you tell me about MBC (Morris Benjamin Cassanova) Signs and how you started it?

Morris: MBC Signs started back in 1979, somewhere along that line. I used to work for a company by the name of Red Circus Signs in Harrow Road, but while working for them they moved out close to Heathrow airport and the distance was too far for me to travel. And so I got myself some premises in Kingsland Road and I set up from there.

It was very hard for us to get in with some of the major fried chicken companies…the bigger boys don’t want to know. A lot of it was back-handers, he’ll stick with one company because he’s getting a ticket to Wembley or Wimbledon or something like that, and we were not in a position to make those sorts of offers. So the majority of work which we got was by recommendation from other people.

Siâron: So all the Perfect Fried Chicken and the bigger companies, that came in time did it?

Morris: Yeah, the chicken world or the fast food world started taking over in a big way about ten years ago, no the early 90s. A lot of people who were franchisees say from Kentucky Fried Chicken or something like that, maybe were feeling the squeeze. They feel as though they were working for Kentucky Fried Chicken and y’know Kentucky is so strict, whatever they says goes. And so a lot of them come out of the franchise because they know how to prepare the chicken and how to do that and what have you, a lot of them branch off and call themselves different names. So that’s why we get all these different names now. Some of them who’ve gone on like Sams Fried Chicken and things like that they’ve grown bigger and they’re now letting people use their name for which they charge a certain amount.

Some of the areas are so saturated with chicken shops, y’know what I mean? I blame the council to be honest to a certain extent, for letting a shop be within in a certain y’know. I feel sorry for some of them, when I put up a sign here today for somebody and then next week somebody wants me to put up another sign virtually next door. They’re going to struggle to make ends meet. So eventually what’s happening is that instead of some of the shops just doing chicken alone they diversify to things like pizza, burgers, kebabs, so you can go into one shop and you get four different types of menu as apposed to just chicken alone. Whereas, back to Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would not allow something like that to happen. People like Favorite Fried Chicken, they have got bigger over the years. They’ve got quite a few outlets, and even them tried to become like Kentucky Fried Chicken by not letting the franchisee do anything else apart from chicken, even them in certain areas has allowed certain things to carry on because they notice that the people are struggling to make ends meet. All they want is their money at the end of the day so they allow them to y’know maybe start selling pizzas, start selling burgers and what have you.

Siâron: Sometimes you’ll get a chicken logo appearing for Chicken Cottage and then you have virtually the same logo for Orlando Fried Chicken, how does that work?

Morris: People do copy logos as they go along. We design a hell of a lot of logos for chicken shops of which we’ve never registered any of them, and if these names are not registered people just use them, right? And people like Chicken Cottage and things like that, you’ll see they have a ™ at the end of each of their logos. It’s registered, so anyone trying to copy that, although they look similar in appearance if you look at it, it’s completely different, there’s no interlocking chickens or halal sign and things like that. Everything’s different. The majority of the logos you see floating about we came up with.

Siâron: Yeah, your nickname is Mr Chicken, which is why I got hold of you. Quite a few different chicken and kebab shop owners referred to you by it!

Morris: (laughing) All of these in your book, I did.

Siâron: In London, how much of the signage would you say you’re responsible for?

Morris: I would say 90% of the logos that’s been used out there now, was originally designed by ourselves. People see them and try to change them around a little bit, and you will see somewhere along the line somebody will have something looking similar to that. It’s not all about the bits and pieces that goes with it, they will automatically try to copy it.

Siâron: There’s lots of mimicking America going on isn’t there?

Morris: Yeah, yeah the majority of shop owners out there they want for some reason or other, because Kentucky Fried Chicken is an American company, they wants to give the impression that they are linked with the American fast food chain. In the past Kentucky usually have a little logo, a little slogan, “American Recipe,” people used to copy that. I mean a lot of people still try, and we say, “Oh that’s old fashioned, people not using that again.” Because they try to pull the wool over people’s eyes, you get your Dallas, it’s American, you get your California, it’s American, you get your Mississippi it’s American, and so forth and so on, and people just use those names to link with America just as well as they’re using their recipe, y’know. You hardly ever see a sign saying English Fried Chicken, or with an English name or anything like that.

Siâron: You’ve already mentioned how the menus aren’t necessarily very American anymore?

Morris: No it’s not so American anymore, because people eventually found out it doesn’t matter anymore, once the product is good and it’s selling that’s all people is interested in. In the early days when Kentucky first came over everyone was brain-washed, y’know? It’s American and it’s good, it’s gotta be good because it’s American. It’s not just chicken shops it’s pizza, too. You get people like Domino Pizza or Pizza Hut. You find other little shops they learn how to do pizza and wise up to it, once the quality of your product is good you’ve got companies like Perfect Fried Chicken, which looks different and changes their logo.

Siâron: In all your years working, have you got any funny stories?

Morris: (laughing) My brain is a little bit fuzzy now. We had one, over at Lewisham and he chose the computer age and computer images and things like that. The guy wanted the name Chicken Dot Com. What’s that? That’s the name he wanted. We managed to talk him out of it, y’know. Chicken Dot Com. I was like “Are you some company to repair Chickens?!” (laughs)

There was a bloke as well, near Brixton that way. He wanted his chicken shop, originally he was Dallas, but he wanted to come out of Dallas and wants to use his son’s name. But on the signboard itself there was hardly anything about chicken. It was more like the life of his son, because he wanted all of his pictures all over the sign, y’know? I suppose because he’s so proud of him that’s what he wanted. But it was nothing to do with chicken at all it was mainly just to do with the life story of his son. If you drove past there you wouldn’t think it was a chicken shop. After two or three years he was closed down because nobody was taking much notice. You can only try and advise people when they come along to you in things like that. You don’t think that’s right, you’ve been in the trade for so many years that don’t sound right, y’know? Some people, it takes a hell of a lot to convince them of that, y’know! (laughs).

Graphic designer Siâron Hughes was first drawn to the visual world of fried chicken after a flier was pushed through her door bearing the enticing words “Dunk Your Dipper”. Intrigued, she started documenting and talking to the owners of fried chicken shops all over London and, eventually, in the US.

“At first sight, much of this signage appears the same, but there are differences, subtle as they may be,” she says. This is the real appeal of chicken shop signage.”

What makes her book stand out from other “vernacular type” showcases is her evident interest in the people who run the shops and those involved in producing the graphics for menus, signs and so on. The book is packed with interviews and photographs from the shops, some of which are amusing, others quite touching in their revelation of the sometimes dangerous profession of being a purveyor of fried poultry to the (often drunk) masses.

Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie is published by Mark Batty Publisher, price £14.95

A real human presence: two of Rick Valicenti’s Notes to Self

Although not driven by any explicit theme, today’s opening series of lectures at the 12th Design Indaba in Cape Town proved to have a common thread in invoking the human being at the centre of the creative process. In his closing address earlier this evening, Bruce Mau extended this pervasive thought with an impassioned talk on how our core senses of “love and ambition” will be critical in helping inspire change through design: change that, Mau believes, is encouragingly already beginning to take root…

But more on Mau’s mission later. (The guy warrants a post all to himself).

In the first pair of talks today, Sean Adams and design partner Noreen Morioka discussed the importance of recognising both “fun” and “fear” in their AdamsMorioka studio, while Rick Valicenti went through a selection of his firm Thirst’s work, completed in his tireless search for conveying “real human presence”.

Poster for the Sundance film festival by AdamsMorioka

By way of an introduction, Adams – who is also the current national president of AIGA – hinted that the AdamsMorioka lecture would not, as design talks often do, focus so much on the finished product.

Instead, theirs would reveal the “driving home crying aspect of the job… the bits we’re not supposed to talk about” – the fear, essentially, of criticism, of suffering ideas-block, of ignoring your instincts and not trusting your gut; one of the most valuable bodily assets a designer can possess.

Indeed, Adams recalled a meeting with Robert Redford to discuss the promotional material for his Sundance film festival.

After numerous unsatisfactory attempts at concepts for posters (Redford knows a thing or two about graphic design, apparently) Adams went with his very first sketch of an idea.

Fear in itself can be a good thing though, Adams concluded – designers need to stop and ask themselves, ‘just what is that I’m trying to protect myself from?’

Work for Nickelodeon

Morioka picked up the second half of the talk by turning the attention onto how the AM studio maintains a sense of fun within their working practice.

Throughout their work – for clients as diverse as GAP and Disney, UCLA and CalArts, bright colours, bold type and an LA exuberance abounds. But it’s via witty, often satirical, self-initiated projects that they really push the fun boat out.

Work for Mohawk fine papers

The pair’s well-honed skills as story-tellers suggests that the NM studio must be a pretty fun place to work as it is. Adams’ talk had already been peppered with aphorisms from the lyrical work of Rogers and Hammerstein, no less.

But there is a very serious studio at work here. Morioka sagely commented on how it was “important to be creative, but more important to be an advocate of creativity.”

And the Indaba would no doubt agree…

Rick Valicenti’s methodology is to establish one-to-one connections with people via his design and typographic work. “Through creation, we pass on the good spirit,” he says rather appealingly.

What follows is a great foray into how design can crop up in places where even the designer doesn’t expect it. Valicenti’s typefaces can find themselves on unintended platforms: his sci-fi font, Infinity, was originally designed for US Robotics, but wound up showcased in a fictional art catalogue (designed by Thirst) and ultimately on CBS’ somewhat garish website.

Valicenti’s late-nineties adventures in the digital realm were ahead of their time. A beautiful motion graphics piece he designed in 1999 for a Herman Miller showroom, for example, was created using computer software and motion capture.

While it’s overtly a digital piece – tracking the movement of a ballet dancer – it boasts more humanity than much of today’s most complex CGI.

An installation for Herman Miller featured motion capture animation

For Valicenti, the human being is at the core of all his work or, at least, the quest for the human presence is.

Take the fantastic digital piece he made in collaboration with the artist Arik Levy, a 15-minute visual simulation of a recording of a phone conversation he had with Levy about his forthcoming exhibition (a video of the work is here).

As Levy gets more animated and excited, the mass of lines and nodes gets more intense.

Stills from Valicenti’s collaboration with artist Arik Levy which visualised Levy’s voice

Valicenti ended reiterating the importance of personal expression in working life.

His Note to Self project is essentially a series of visual journal entries he made over a year, using Sumi ink applied with a syringe or foam brush on Rives paper. Here are four of them:

“Part mood-swing, part fact, part fiction and fantasy,” apparently. Brilliant.

As head of the Design Interactions department at the RCA, Anthony Dunne is no doubt surrounded by an array fascinating student projects. Along with his RCA colleague, Fiona Raby, the pair also design as Dunne & Raby and so, for their presentation, they showed a mixture of work from students and practitioners working within nano and bio-tech design and their own investigations into technological advances.

Meat is not necessarily murder (when there’s no victim)

They opened with some arresting images from a project called Victimless Meat, developed by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben Ary, a meat product that can be grown in a laboratory from cells obtained from animals.

And as consumers, it’s in our relationship to these kinds of scientific developments that various design-related questions inevitably arise. What shape should this victimless meat be if it was produced? How would it be marketed? If no animals were killed in its formation, then could vegetarians eat it too?

Or could you take cells from humans – from popstars or politicians? – consuming their meat as an act of love, or hate, even.

This act of “putting these ideas into a consumer consciousness”, explained Dunne, “doesn’t belittle them, but activates a different part of our thinking.”

Design is essentially functioning as a language with which to open up discussions of how these technologies might open up our lives.

Another interesting project they discussed was their own Evidence Dolls commission for the Pompidou Center in Paris which, again, was a way of investigating how biotechnologies might impact on society.

A quick look at their site offers some detailed explanation: “We focussed on young single women and their love lives as this provided a number of interesting perspectives on genetics: designer babies, desirable genes, mating logic, DNA theft. It is not intended to be scientific, but more a way of unlocking their imaginations and generating stories that once made public, trigger thoughts and discussions in other people.”

“One hundred special dolls were produced to contain material from a male lover from which DNA could be extracted at a later date. The dolls were made from white plastic (which could be annotated) and came in three penis sizes, S, M, and L.”

As Dunne outlined, their investigations are more about asking questions than providing answers. They certainly posed some very intruiging ones today. (Check out their work and ideas at dunneandraby.co.uk).

A moving presentation from Luyanda Mpahlwa of Cape Town’s MMA architects followed in the afternoon, which I’ll post more on once we’ve been to see the work of the 10×10 architectural project in action.

Plus there was some more inspiring work from product designer Stephen Burks (who was lucky enough to receive a giant birthday cake on stage) and the charming and highly-talented Paris-based collective, 5.5.

And Bruce Mau’s emerging plans to establish a series of Centers (plural) for Massive Change will be looked at in more detail in another post.

The bar’s been set pretty high for tomorrow.

Berlin-based design studio, Hort’s work on record sleeves invariably floats our boat and we love the batch of sleeves they’ve recently produced for Jazzanova’s album Of All The Things (which actually came out late last year) and singles Let Me Show Ya and I Can See. Here they all are, with the back covers shown too so you can see how they look too. Also shown is a poster and the album art booklet that has a rather nice embossed cover…

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Original ravers, The Prodigy have just released a new album, entitled Invaders Must Die on the Cooking Vinyl label. Art direction and design of the album (LP sleeve with its two inner sleeves shown above) is by Paul Insect.

You can also buy the album as a boxed set of five 7-inch singles (box not pictured)

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The hard back book, Money Will Ruin Everything 2, comes with a folded poster acting as a decorative dust jacket – and the 2 CDs themselves, each housed in a delicately coloured card sleeve, are housed in the folds

In 2003 record label Rune Grammofon released a double CD and book called Money Will Ruin Everything to celebrate its fifth anniversary. Now, just over another five years down the line, the label has released Money Will Ruin Everything 2 – a book designed by Kim Hiorthøy that includes new graphic artworks, photos, video stills, seen and unseen sleeve art, a complete label discography, two interviews between Hiorthøy and the label’s founder Rune Kristoffersen, an essay on the label’s record covers by Adrian Shaughnessy and forewords by Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis and Rolling Stone magazine’s David Fricke. Here are some spreads from the book:

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When we were in new Nike store 1948 (see previous post) we picked up a copy of The AM90 Sound boxed vinyl pack – adorned with artwork by Dutch illustrator Parra. The box set of eight vinyl records, a book and a DVD is the fruition of a project which saw photographer Shawn Mortensen travel across Europe and hanging out with eight young musicians from different cities who are all fans of Nike’s classic AirMax 90 (AM90) trainer. Each musician provided previously unreleased tracks for their vinyl disc in the box set. Design wise, the eight 12-inch record covers and 12-inch book can be arranged to form a 3×3ft version of Parra’s box top illustration (above).

To watch the documentary and for more info on the project, click here

Italian Vogue – A Black Issue, July 2008, fashion category winner

The winners in each category of the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2009 have been announced, ahead of an overall winner that will be revealed at a gala ceremony at the Design Museum in London on March 18.

The Design Awards have seven categories – architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. The exhibition of the awards, currently on show at the Design Museum, contains several entries in each category, which have all been nominated by critics, curators and design practitioners. These have been whittled down to a shortlist of seven who are now vying for the top accolade of Brit Insurance Design of the Year.

The panel of judges this year consists of broadcaster Alan Yentob, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, designer and environmentalist Karen Blincoe, architect Peter Cook, fashion critic Sarah Mower, and last year’s winner, designer Yves Béhar.

The judges chose Italian Vogue: A Black Issue, July 2008 (shown top) as their winner in the fashion category. “Deemed a cultural watershed, A Black Issue firmly placed the debate about the lack of black models in the fashion industry to the very forefront of the fashion world’s consciousness as well as causing widespread debate outside fashion circles,” said the judges of their choice.

Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster won in graphics

Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama poster is the winner in the graphics category. The judges commented that “if there ever were to be a ‘poster of the year’, the Obama poster would be it. The US election was a watershed in contemporary history and this poster demonstrates the power of communicating ideas and aspirations from grass-root level. Just as the presidential candidate’s campaign speeches recaptured the lost art of oratory, so this poster breathed new life into a form that had lost its purpose.”

Make Magazine was the winner in interactive

Make Magazine is the interactive category winner. “Make Magazine is a website and blog that has created a remarkable resource through which to explore the process of making,” say the judges. “It is much more sophisticated than your everyday DIY website; Make Magazine presents you with unusual blueprints in which the users own input and customisation are both of practical and social value.”

Magno Wooden Radio won in product

The Magno Wooden Radio, designed by Singgih S Kartono, won in the product category. “The radio reflects a sense of purpose in the wider design context,” say the judges. “The designer has brought together local crafts people, teaching them new skills in making and assembling the radio, and by using local wood has brought a positive and sustainable infrastructure to a small community.”

Line-J Medellin Metro Cable won in transport

In transport, the Line-J Medellin Metro Cable in Colombia, designed by Poma, took the category prize. “This is a great example of how to re-appropriate an already successful cable car envisaged for ski slopes into a mass transit system for the urban poor,” say the judges.

Konstantin Grcic’s MYTO Chair was the winner in furniture

In furniture, Konstantin Grcic’s MYTO Chair was the winner and is described as a “design classic” by the judges. “It is tough creating a design classic, but the MYTO might just have achieved this through its rigorous experimentation and research, resulting in the technically very difficult outcome of a cantilevered plastic chair,” they say.

The New Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta won the architecture category

Finally, in architecture it was the New Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta which won the category award this year. “This is more than a beautifully designed building and an opera house,” say the judges, “it’s a living part of the city, a place for music, but also an outdoor space, somewhere all kinds of people like to go. Its mix of indoor and outdoor spaces attracts not just opera enthusiasts. It’s a building that gives people the chance to roam through, across and on top of it, all the way from sea to roof level.”

The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition will be on show at the Design Museum until June 14. More info is at designmuseum.org.

Studio Output sends us news of their latest project – a rebranding of the Nottingham-based café and restaurant, Shaw’s. Studio Output created a new logo, website and a number of printed materials including menus and signage. Each features a quote relating to the finer points of hospitality. Rather nice we thought…