Ace Jet 170

Magic

Episode 1: A Potter

I'm not a fan of The Potter. Too derivative for me. But I know, I concede, I’m in the minority; I certainly am in our household. I’m not sure what the dog thinks but everyone else (the goldfish doesn’t count) flipping loves a bit of Potter.

During the summer we went to The Making of Harry Potter, down there at Leavesden Studios near Watford. Even I was a little excited – I imagined there would be at least one or two things I’d find interesting. I was wrong. There was loads of stuff. You’d have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Potterette, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to get excited about.

The sheer volume of stuff is enough to make you pledge your allegiance to He Who Shall Not Be Named in order to obtain just a tiny fragment of it. Thankfully your soul is saved (although not your bank balance) by the gift shop, crammed as it is to the mythical sea creature’s gills with fabulous stuff. The perfect takeaway being, obviously, a wand and we were delighted to be fleeced two-fold…for two.

Magic: a delightful visitor experience and a perfect memento of the day.

 

Episode 2: The Poet

At the end of September Tandem’s latest project went live: Seamus Heaney | Man & Boy is a permanent visitor experience, housed within HomePlace, a new arts centre dedicated to, arguably, Ireland’s greatest modern poet. I had very little to do with the project so when we all went along just prior to launch day, I could enjoy it without too much baggage. I wasn’t that involved but I was in close enough proximity to the project team for a little Heaney magic to have rubbed off on me and I had by this time come to enjoy his words immensely.

Man & Boy has been received very well so far with some great press coverage in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. It is a special experience and I think you'd have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Heaneyite, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to enjoy. At the centre of the inspiration gallery upstairs there is a fountain pen, suspended as if in thin air. It's the kind of pen Heaney used.

The perfect takeaway? His wand…his gold nibbed, inky wand.

 

Episode Three: Two Jokers

You can’t buy a Conway Stewart from HomePlace. The company that made them went out of business, first in 1975 and then later in 2014 after an attempt to rejuvenate the brand just didn’t come off; despite the company's reputation for excellent pens demand was just not high enough.

The company was started originally in 1905 when Frank Jarvis and Thomas Garner left De La Rue, a leading fountain pen manufacturer, to set up on their own. Legend has it that they named the business after two music hall comedians of the day. It didn’t do them any harm, things went pretty well and Conway Stewart enjoyed great success with their top notch and affordable fountain pens.

It must have been some time in the 50s that Seamus Heaney was presented with his pen by his parents. He was 14 and went on to use that pen for the rest of his life. He wrote about it more than once: in ‘Digging’, the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, Heaney famously wrote:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

In the more explicit 'The Conway Stewart’, from Human Chain, he beats less around the bush and goes into so much detail that pen nerds have speculated confidently over precisely which model he describes – probably a 58 although some have suggested a 388.

Mine is a 15.

I got it on ebay. It’s a nice example although not exactly like the Poet’s. His had three gold bands around the lid, mine only has one. But still, when it arrived my hands trembled as I removed it from its modest packaging. It feels nice in the hand and is, I have to say, an elegant pen. Yes, it’s “squat”, as Heaney described his and yes, it does feel “as snug as a gun”.

It also feels magic.

Night and Day

Back in the day, agency types would have to defend apparent wasted space on a layout by claiming that it “illuminated the message”. Maybe they still do. No false claim though, we all know that what you leave out is as important as what you put in and yes, white space does illuminate the message.

A few weeks ago we put out a recruitment ad. It was a great opportunity for someone to join the fabulous Tandem team. All we needed to do was put the ad out there and watch the applications come flooding in…

Time passed…

No applicants.

More time passed…

Still no applicants. 

I began to wonder why. The ad was thorough and truthful; detailed and clear. I showed it to some design-related friends and invited criticism. Oh boy, did it get criticism. I think “intimidating” and “a bit dull” were amongst the harshest comments. So I sought sagely advice from one who knows – from an expert in such wordly matters: ace writer for brands Mike Reed.

Mike swiftly and efficiently destroyed what I'd written and, kindly, recrafted it. It was like night and day. Dull and intimidating became interesting and welcoming. A new ad went out…

And, we got takers – some really good ones.

What Mike did played on my mind over the following days. During that time this other thing happened: I was in an internal meeting which was interrupted by a colleague who needed to ask our Creative Director an important budget-related question. Something had to be cut – maybe we could pull back on the lighting? The answer was clear: there were others things to cut before the lighting. The lighting was too important.

And it clicked. What Mike did to our ad was introduce some good lighting. The new ad said the same thing as our original…but the message had become illuminated…by better words.

I’m beginning to learn that good lighting makes all the difference in a museum or visitor experience. It guides you through a space, draws you in, reveals where to look, shows you which direction to take. It’s your invisible, intangible guide.

In copy, good writing does the same: it guides, draws you in and it reveals. Just like how bad lighting kills a museum space, bad writing kills the message.

I discussed all this briefly with Mike and he observed, “lighting and copy are often overlooked, but when they’re rubbish you really notice – of course, when they’re at their best, you don’t notice them at all”. Which nails it really: in design, even in the broadest sense, the most important things are often the things that, when done properly, no one notices. Beautiful lighting, good typography, a well proportioned page, expertly crafted copy – when executed really well, are often invisible and yet, they illuminate.

Tooled Up

You can’t hope to improve, significantly, as a designer by merely practicing design. You’ll get better at Photoshop as you find your way around its hidden depths, your typography might creep forward with exposure to its challenges, you might have a natural grasp of colour, but progress will be slow unless you look further afield for your influences. Latching onto a sage-like mentor of some kind or bathing in the foamy mix of design history are hard to better.

Same goes for writing. Writing in isolation is unlikely to lead you along the twisty-turny, bramble-blocked path that the writer has to follow in order to hone his or her wordsmithery. Better to latch onto a sage-like mentor or bathe in the foamy mix of literary history.

Maybe, even, read a book about writing.

A friend of mine, clearly trying to tell me something, sent me Roy Peter Clarke’s book Writing Tools at Christmas. Never has a book sustained my interest so effectively. Juggling a few volumes on unconnected subjects, my pace through Writing Tools has been gentle. But that’s just heightened my enjoyment. I’ve been taking each chapter, each strategy, slowly. And with each comes a beautifully useful nugget of writing wisdom.

I’m a better writer for reading Writing Tools.

A Creative Exploration

Another Escape sets out to capture the enthusiasm of others. Investigating the lives and pastimes of individuals who throw themselves, with zeal, headlong into the endeavours that they find the greatest affinity with. I get that. For a long time I've felt there's little difference between someone obsessed with, for example, the micro details of type and typography and those preoccupied with the intricacies of craft ales or the plummage of our feathered friends.

One man's nerdy obsession is another's passion and who are we to judge the validity of another's fixation. As the Another Escape team says themselves, "We can take away from these energetic individuals fuel for our own motivation".

In Volume One you'll meet, amongst many others: Jim and Lou from Brighton Miniclick, Amy and Claire from Super + Super, Ace Jet favourites Jane and Ben from Herb Lester, James from Boneshaker and Mike, from his allotment.

Best you go and buy it. From here.

 

Darling

If you didn't know, each year at around this time (well, in time for Christmas) Pentagram produce a small holiday book; something playful. Last year it was Today I'm Feeling Turquoise. This year it's a book of push out, metallic silver gift tags with special messages on the back. Special, heart-rending, touching (slightly twisted) messages of love and desire…and paperclips and ice scrapers. 

Written by Naresh Ramchandani with the help of Tom Edmonds and Nick Molster, it's very simple and very funny. Click each image to read the texts.

Temporary Herbster

Truly, madly, deeply honoured to be writing this month for Herb Lester's Journal. During October I'll be offering a smattering of sneaky peeks into some of my favouraite bits of Belfast, opening up with the easily missed but highly evocative Linen Hall Library.

One Final Thing

Oh this is so late that I'm embarrassed to be posting it now. things 19-20 has been travelling around with me for practically two months I think. It's the last ever printed edition. But don't panic, things isn't folding, it's just going digital with talk of all manner of possibilities for the future. You can still get an actual ink on paper copy, I believe, here.

The Thompson/Chase Debacle

If you follow the CR Blog (which you probably do so I don't know why I'm telling you this because you'll have seen it) you'll probably have picked up on the kerfuffle surrounding the promotional campaign that The Chase (with Total Content and Asbury & Asbury) have developed for ace photographer Paul Thompson (who has some astonishing work). As things played out it turned out to be a storm in a teacup with it's rather feeble critics being swiftly and appropriately dispatched with a clip 'round their misguided ears. The campaign is, after all, great. And I think what the criticism shows is how a brave idea whittles out those that get what you do and those that don't. A job well done if you ask me.

Hats off to everyone involved but especially to Paul for running with the concept.

Many Happy Return

Very lovely postcards from Asbury & Asbury, written and designed to mark the return to prominence of the Macclesfield Barnaby Festival. Much more about it on their blog.

 

 

Mad Man

I read John Simmons' book Dark Angels (How writing releases creativity at work) immediately after his talk the other week. It's an excellent book and I emerged out of it full of ideas. Practice was one of them and one way John suggests you do that is to keep a diary. Nothing ground-breaking there but during the course of writing the book, he realised that that was one thing he'd never done, so tried it. Me to. Perhaps 'diary' isn't quite right. What I'm doing is using a Moleskine diary as a place to write something every day. Not necessarily something specifically diarific, just something. And so far, I've really enjoyed the discipline of having to write something every day. So far, while I don't claim these writings rival Hemingway, I think I've managed to avoid writing a load of old shite.

This snippet from Dark Angels has nothing really to do with any of that but with the next episode of Mad Men approaching fast I thought I'd share, as Simmons did in his book to illustrate how learning from other writers is vital, this excerpt, originally written in 1955, from The Unpublished David Ogilvy.

26

So John Simmons came to talk to us last week and gave a really enjoyable presentation on the value of story telling in our work. Simmons, if you don't know, writes a lot of stuff for brands and has credentials so impressive you can pretty much assume he knows his stuff. It was a different kind of talk for us really - not so much to see (we're usually listening to designers) - but there was actually more to learn. As a designer who likes to write, John's talk was a proverbial kick up the whatsit - I need to try harder. I need to work on my words more. So I've started with a couple of his books (Dark Angels and his latest, Twenty-six ways to look at a blackberry)…I'll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, here's the promotional booklet for his* not-for-profit, writing champions 26.

 

* Saying "his" is probably not quite right but John was one of the founding members.