Hasta La Ideas

FUEL keep a sketchbook. They put funny things like this in it

A new book reveals the scribbles and sketches contained in the most personal of a designer’s possessions: their notebook…

Spread from a sketchbook belonging to illustrator Serge Bloch

A visual communications title like CR tends to focus on the finished article: the work that
made it into production. Often as interesting, though, are the workings-out that precede the final outcome: the sketches and drawings and ideas in development (as we featured in our November 07 Work In Progress issue).

Various sketchbook pages by Pablo Amargo

For the majority of creative people, the sketchbook is where such ideas take shape. In a new book published by Laurence King, Richard Brereton has gathered together a whole range of pages from such sketchbooks, belonging to a selection of illustrators and designers.

It’s most definitely an intriguing prospect as it offers a glimpse into a private world of unresolved ideas, pre-formed jottings and the obsessions of many a creative. The sketchbook, as Brereton writes in his introduction, can be “a visual diary” or “simply a place to play”.

Two pages from one of Henrik Delehag’s 2003 sketchbooks

CR Creative Future, Paul M Dreibholz, uses his sketchbook for typographic experimentation

Of course, the way in which an artist uses his or her sketchbook denotes the kind of work on show in the book. So while Lauren Simkin Berke and Serge Bloch offer up a range of charming workings-out (which, in Bloch’s case, were towards a commissioned job), Pablo Amargo fills his pages with considered collages and Renato Alarcão displays a series of watercolours that he, apparently, often completes in 20-minute sessions.

Sketchbooks by Hiro Kurata

Flo Heiss draws everybody’s favourite narky ornithologist, Bill Oddie

For Peter Saville, the experience of recording things in a notebook is more self-analytical. “The work one does for others is less personal and rarely emotional or biographical,” he says in the text accompanying his work. “My notebooks have one subject: what is my work and what is the point of it?”

Work by Henrik Delehag (see above)

While the work included here is, essentially, the private made public, this insight only jars when the work is displayed as a piece of Art in its own right, devoid from its context within a sketchbook.

Most, fortunately, have been photographed as is and this makes for a much more interesting (and more appropriate) examination of the creative process. When that happens, Sketchbooks offers glimpses of a fair few unseen treasures.

Sketchbooks is published by Laurence King; £19.95. This review features on the books page of the March issue of CR

 
Detail from Harry Beck’s 1951 Paris Metro map design (which was rejected by the city’s transport authorities). Used by kind permission London Transport Museum

The Royal Mail recently commem­orated one of the UK’s greatest works of visual infor­mation design when Harry Beck’s London Underground diagram was included for the first time on a British postage stamp writes Mark Ovenden. The impor­tance of Beck’s rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognised and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did – to the nearest major subway network to London: Paris.

In 1951 Beck submitted this revised edition of a map he had worked on for the Paris Metro in the late 1930s. But his map for the French capital was rejected and a diagrammatic approach to the city’s system wasn’t employed until 1999. Used by kind permission London Transport Museum

Despite his deserved fame, recent research shows Beck was not the first person to iron out meanders in a waving rail line or colour lines in a system: he could have been inspired by other diagrammatic transport maps, by LNER draughts­man George Dow; indi­vidual line maps inside Underground trains; and possibly a geometric representation of the Berlin S-Bahn, believed to pre-date Beck’s by two years.

Map collector Peter B Lloyd says Beck built on what went before: “going back to the Underground Group’s first modern-looking maps of 1908”. Beck’s earliest sketches for the diagram published by London Transport in 1933 were first prepared during 1931 – the same date the Berlin S-Bahn plan was printed.

Was this 1931 Berlin S-Bahn diagram (detail shown) an influence on Beck’s iconic 1933 London tube map design? © BVG

Though it’s not possible to know whether Beck saw this, it is unlikely he was aware of it – a case of great minds think alike? Dow’s diagrams were, however, on public view from 1929.

London tube map enthusiast Professor Maxwell Roberts draws on his impres­sive collection of pre-Beck railway diagrams, many emanating from the prolific Southern Railway’s timetables, and some dating to the 1890s when mainline railways across Europe were struggling to show their perplexing array of routes as directly as possible.

Gotthard Winter Season plan, 1897

The Gotthard Winter Season plan of 1897, for example, has only straight lines between the big cities. And as Lloyd suggests: making a successful diagram is not simply a matter of straightening out lines: “The concept of a closed system, as opposed to a map of all railway lines… the use of colour coding; abstracting the Underground from back­ground topographical features; compression of outlying lines; the use of special symbols for inter­changes – key elements of the visual language… were all invented [before Beck].”

Despite these facts, Beck’s contribution was impressive; the name of this electrical draughtsman has become an international byword for public transport schematics. His principles of neat 45 degree angles, elimination of topography and equalised station spacing have been emulated (as my book, Metro Maps of the World, showed) by urban rail map-makers from Atlanta to Zurich. But not, in the end, by Paris.

Image: Joe Clark/fawny.org

Like London before Beck, the Paris Metro network had almost exclusively been represented geographically: maps outside stations were (and continue to be) highly detailed topographic plans of the entire city, showing virtually every road, park and waterway with the Metro lines superimposed in all their winding glory.

Some rather excessive geometry on this Kandinsky-esque Paris Metro pocket map, issued by a private publisher in 1939. © All rights reserved

Though a few examples of privately drawn diagrams have emerged (one Kandinsky-esque rhapsody in abstraction from 1939, so utterly bizarre and impractical that it was never repeated) schematics were not adopted by the city until the last years of the 20th century.

According to Ken Garland’s history, Mr Beck’s Underground Map, the Metro operator approached Beck to design a diagram. Garland supposes the work was begun in the late 1930s but not finished until after the War. Little survives of his first attempt except a lone copy in Garland’s collection.

Beck’s first diagram of the Paris Metro. Ken Garland believes that Beck worked on this in the late 1930s, submitting the plan just after the end of WWII (only to see it rejected). Printed by kind permission Ken Garland/Capital Transport

The Paris Metro is not as easy to simplify as the London Underground. Firstly the lines interweave with each other more (Ligne 7 being the snakiest of these customers); this gives rise to more interchanges (by 1933 around 40 in London, 50 in Paris). Also the system was then mostly hemmed-in by the old Paris walls (a distance equivalent east-west to the width between South Kensington and Canary Wharf and north-south between Camden and Brixton).

With 200-plus stations in easy reach, this is great for passengers, but more challenging for map-makers. One of Beck’s greatest innova­tions was to massively expand inner London and condense the outer suburbs. This was just not needed in Paris (at that time) because the entire system was already in the ‘centre’ and very few stations in the suburbs.

Beck’s 1933 diagram. © TfL/London Transport Museum

What Beck therefore tried for Paris was in some ways more radical than what he’d achieved for London. He sought, in the mass of interlinked lines, some key visual axes to give his diagram order. Seizing the east-west running Ligne 1, Beck made it his prime axis (not as in London’s Central Line, running horizontally, but at that neat angle of 45 degrees). He exploited something unnoticed by previous cartographers: that Lines 2 and 6 form a rudimentary circle. Beck transformed them into a rectangle with rounded edges.

From these roots he plotted the other lines as straight as possible with impressive results: the curvaceous Ligne 10 becomes a flat line with its odd one-way loop stylised at extreme left. Kinky Ligne 14 is straightened to a single stroke. Ligne 3 – often seen on other maps with up to 11 direction changes – is reduced to just one nicely rounded alteration.

The overall appearance is clear, balanced and arguably easier to follow. But the key question was: would the French like it? The answer when Beck presented his first version was a resounding “Non!” Beck was not deterred. Indeed, his first London diagram was also rejected but he persisted and eventually its adoption, adoration and appositeness for the Underground was widely applauded. The same fate was not to befall Paris.

Beck went back to his drawing board and produced a second version. It’s not known if this was commissioned but, luckily for us, it survives in full colour and was recently revealed as one of the attractions at the refurbished London Transport Museum. It was published for the first time in a book when Paris Metro Style: In Map and Station Design came out in November 2008.

Details from Beck’s second attempt at the Paris Metro map. Used by kind permission London Transport Museum

Like any inspired genius, Beck did not waver from his initial concept: here again were his two original axes but Ligne 4 is simplified in its northern half. There are 15 physical direction changes in Ligne 7; Beck whittled these down to two. Ligne 8’s 14 real bends went to two, Ligne 11’s eight turns cut to none and Beck also, with great wit, added the River Seine.

So why did the Paris Metro (now operated by the RATP) reject Beck’s clear simplification of their beloved system? One reason is visible at each station entrance; Parisians use the maps here as a free public service to help them find their way round the city – the ubiquitous geographic wall map is more than just a Metro plan.

Detail from the Turgot map of Paris, 1739

The French adore pure cartography – laying claim to many mapping firsts, not least of which was Cassinni’s magnificent Carte géométrique de la France – a topographic map of the entire country (begun in the 1670s, though not finished until a century later). The painstakingly precise 1739 Turgot map of Paris (a kind of 3D view from the air, purported to show every visible window) is legendary.

Aside from cartographic history though, Roberts argues there was a fundamental problem with Beck’s Ligne 1 axis: “Paris is on a slant. Line 1 especially… is at roughly 25 degrees to horizontal. For a traditional diagrammatic map, which angle should it be snapped to – horizontal or 45 degrees? Whatever angle [is chosen, results in] at least one of the following problems: (1) uneven use of space as lines are compressed together or stretched apart more than in reality; (2) lots of kinks for trajectory correction to avoid (1); or (3) lots of geographical distortion.”

Roberts suggests Beck’s omissions on both versions (Gare de Lyon missing and Montparnasse drawn wrong on the first, and both Edgar Quinet and Vavin stations missing on the 1951 version), led to suspicion that the concept was untrustworthy. In his fascinating critique of Beck’s work (at tubemapcentral.com) Roberts postulates powerfully that though Beck’s diagram has aesthetic qualities, it distorted well-known Parisian geography too much for comfort.

Also diminishing a diagram’s benefits are the closeness of the stations to each other; one can be plonked down blindfolded in virtually any Paris quarter, walk 500m in any direction and theoreti­cally bump into a Metro entrance. Although in practice there are several holes in the system, such station spacing is much denser than in any other city in the world; a feat the French are justifiably proud of. But pride may be the true reason for the operators’ disinclination towards Beck’s or anyone else’s diagrams.

Beck’s influence travels round the world to form the basis for a plan of Sydney’s mainline rail system, as shown in a 1939 card map (note the adoption of the famous London Underground roundel). Used by kind permission London Transport Museum

By mid-century, Beck’s London diagram was ubiquitous and it was beginning to catch on: Sydney’s rail network was depicted in Beck style from 1939 (when a pocket map was issued on an identical sized folded card even aping the lu roundel on the cover). New York had its first Beck-esque diagram by 1958, Moscow and Osaka: 1970, St Petersburg: 1971, Munich and Tokyo: 1972, Melbourne, Montreal and Glasgow: 1976.

A 1936 version of the ‘Lagoute’ pocket map of the Paris Metro with coloured lines, little topography and some straightening. © RATP

In staunchly proud Paris, despite the multi-coloured spaghetti with which most contemporary maps portrayed the Metro, there was opposi­tion to following Britain. Double-decker buses for instance were tried out in the 1960s but thought unsuitable for Paris streets partially because they looked too British. In addition, a 1934 pocket Metro map by F Lagoute introduced a style that lasted almost 40 years: though it fell short of standardising angles, its clarity and geographical reflection of the city was sufficient for Parisians not to complain.

Such dedication to home-grown products is highly commendable but, ultimately, the over-whelming practicality of the diagram has won out. During the 1980s the ratp experimented with pocket maps, progressively straightening lines, equalising station spacing and permitting a degree of abstraction.

The current Paris Metro pocket diagram. © RATP

Mindful of Paris’s prominent position as the most visited city on the planet, the forward-thinking head of ratp’s design department, Yo Kaminagai, ordered his map designers to begin a quiet cartographic revolution from 1987 which finally resulted in the commis­sioning of a diagram. The 2000 design from agency bdc Conseil adheres so rigidly to Beck’s rules that he would surely have been honoured by it, and though there are now almost twice as many lines (including five rer lines) the current pocket map has become as accepted a part of French life as a Beck-esque diagram is for virtually every other city.

The Paris region’s rail services as a single diagram. © RATP

There was just one idiosyncracy: the geographic maps were retained as large wall posters at station entrances and on platforms. Yet even this hegemony for true geography was finally toppled in 2008 by the introduction of a map for the Île-de-France region’s rail services, becoming the first truly diagrammatic station wall poster. With 45 degree angles and distortion of some gaps and distances, one cannot help imagining that Beck, who died in 1974, would have cracked a wry smile.

Mark Ovenden is a writer with a particular interest in the graphic design, cartography and architecture of public transport systems. His website is at markovenden.com. This article appears in the March issue of Creative Review.

Further reading:
Paris Metro Style: In Map and Station Design (£29.95) and Metro Maps of the World (£25) by Mark Ovenden; Mr Beck’s Underground Map (£12.95) by Ken Garland; Underground Maps After Beck (£18.95) by Professor Maxwell Roberts. All published by Capital Transport and available from capitaltransport.com

Apart from a kick-ass logo, they also work with some really sick illustrators and photographers. Check out the site here.

Big Active is a creative consultancy specializing in art direction, graphic design and the select management of leading illustrators (borrowed word for word from their site info). There’s a pretty long list of illustrators worth checking out, including the particularly popular Parra, Siggi Eggertsson, and Genevieve Gauckler (to name a few).

Day two of Cape Town’s Design Indaba began very promisingly, with a demonstration of the best that South African animation has to offer. Jannes Hendrikz and Markus Smit from The Black Heart Gang showed their beautiful 2006 short film, The Tale of How. The Black Heart Gang are interesting in that they’re just a trio comprised of a video-maker, an illustrator, and a writer/musician and that, between them, have produced such well-crafted and involving work…

The BHG have also produced a series of 13 prints based on scenes from the film (which was originally written as a poem by Smit). The success of The Tale of How led them onto a similarly sea-bound spot for United airlines, in which a lobster conducts an animal orchestra.

Next up was Commonwealth, the Brooklyn-based studio formed by husband and wife David Boira and Zoë Boira-Coombes.

Impossible to pigeon-hole, these architecturally-trained designers have been responsible for making, or collaborating in producing, all manner of objects where the process of creation often mixes cutting edge technologies with traditional craft.

One of a pair of masks made in SLA photoresin and horse hair, for a collaborative project with Timothy Saccenti

Furniture is key to them, but they’ve turned their hand (and in some cases their studio-based three axis CNC mill) to a range of work: from record sleeves for Warp, vases with Josh Davis designs, bronze door handles to, most recently, a pair of bright green masks, complete with hand-plugged horse hair.

Boira’s father was an artist and in a revealing diptych, a picture of Boira Snr showed him working on a large canvas; clearly an important echo from the past as, twenty years later, a photo of the younger Boira showed him adopting a similar pose as he got to work on a Commonwealth project.

Indeed, for all their contemporary technical know-how (which is vast) and mastery of materials, the pair reveal an innate love of making things.

Morfina door handles, in bronze

They often use animation tools to instigate the design of a project – as in their Fleshless Floor created for a NYC gallery space – but the end result, in this case, also relies on the natural beauty of layered wood and a particular finishing technique that makes the surface look like skin.

Boira-Coombes put it nicely when she said that, for Commonwealth, the “technological tools have given us a change to engage with the traditional processes. They’re a mode for translating your ideas better.”

Table from Commonwealth’s Lard Series

The studio also challenged the ideas of exterior/interior relationships via a beautiful table and bureau set, that reveals a luxurious, wet-looking, sensual area within each sliding drawer; adding an intimacy to an otherwise minimally designed exterior.

“We sometimes don’t know how to control the things we work with,” said Boira-Coombes, “our best work could be in 20 years. We really don’t know what’s coming.” Whatever is, it’s undoubtedly going to be exciting.

From London, interiors, furniture and product designers BarberOsgerby gave a run through of their working process and induced the first collective “ahhhhh” from the audience when they revealed the final outcome of their Iris Table project for Established & Sons on the big Indaba screen:

Blue Iris Table by BarberOsgerby

Each striped segment is a piece of anodised aluminum. It’s heavy and much, much bigger than it looks in this picture (about four feet across at a guess?). I think the BarberOsgerby boys have collected a fair few new fans in Cape Town.

Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake proved to be an inspired choice for the Indaba line-up.

He explained the genesis of the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) concept and the intrinsic ‘flatness’ of fabric that, in the creation of a garment, becomes three-dimensional. The A-POC idea is centred around interactivity, with the consumer cutting out a shape for an item of clothing from two pieces of material.

The notion of “hidden stories” also permeated Fujiwara’s accounts of the research processes that go on at the Japanese studio. Color Hunting is one such example.

Image: Giovanni Giononni

Fujiwara showed a film of his trip to the Amazon jungle to research the specific colour palette of the environment, to be used in a collection. His team were shown matching colour swatches to giant leaves, tree trunks, flowers and, bizarrely, the river itself.

While such a project certainly raised a few knowing eyebrows, it seemed that – pretentions aside – this was more about the vision of someone determined enough to carry an initial concept through to its conclusion.

Indeed, writing off Fujiwara’s Amazonian Color Hunting as a frivolous exercise was by the by.

What proved interesting was that, rather than one leaf being much the same colour as another, the meticulous colour comparisons revealed a range of “weak greens”, of light beige and, when it came to matching the colour of the river, among the light browns and greys, a hitherto undetected peach tone emerged. Back in the studio the assembled colours looked great and knowing how they were related to one another added something quite special to the work.

This gorgeous print by Jesse Lefkovitz is this week’s Tiny Showcase. (Jesse’s one of the artists in The Shatner Show book)