While the advertising community was celebrating at this year’s D&AD Awards and rightly so (see results here), many designers looked on aghast. The reason? There are no D&AD awards in graphic design this year. Not one. Not a single yellow pencil was awarded in any of the graphics categories. Now what?

It’s been coming for some time. Despite the efforts of D&AD itself, successive graphics juries over a number of years were, I believe, excessively mean. Entrants became discouraged, it seems, and now, by all accounts, some leading graphics studios have given up on entering entirely. Judges this year tell us that the standard of work was “appalling”.

And now here we are. It bears repeating because it is scarcely believable, but there is not one graphics pencil at D&AD this year. Which isn’t to say that graphic design or designers were totally absent from the stage. There are some graphics-related winners – in magazine design, books, packaging and even a coveted Gold award for The Partners’ Grand Tour project. The latter (below) was entered into an advertising category. It was also entered into graphics, where it only managed an In-Book. Go, as they say, figure.

We invited Michael Johnson and Sean Perkins to discuss what the organisation needs to do in order to win back graphic designers (which you can read here). Perkins’ North is one of those leading design studios that no longer sees a reason for entering D&AD. Johnson, on the other hand, is an ex-D&AD President and has been one of the organisation’s greatest advocates for many years. If even he is losing faith in the awards, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Yes, there are other contributing factors beyond D&AD’s control. The nature of graphic design is changing with many studios engaged on projects that do not fit comfortably into D&AD’s graphics categories or judging methods. Music, so long a rich source of the kind of aesthetically pleasing work that juries have long favoured is no longer providing the opportunities it once did. And now that nearly all design studios have websites, there are other ways of showcasing work and reaching potential clients than winning awards. Plus the trend in graphic design is toward smaller studios for whom entry fees put considerable pressure on finances. But there is great work out there, as exhibited in CR’s own Annual.

Should we care? We should because this is about more than just a few bruised egos. Yes, awards are an imperfect measure of worth in a field as complex as design, but they have their place. If leading graphic designers are turning away from the D&AD awards, they are turning away from D&AD itself and the educational activities that are at the heart of what D&AD stands for. One goes hand-in-hand with the other. If you believe in D&AD’s mission, as I do, then you enter the awards in order to fund that important mission, with the added bonus that, should you win, it will help your business. D&AD’s charitable activities are immensely valuable and it deserves the support of everyone in the creative industries.

Somehow, D&AD has failed to get this message across to the graphic design community. It has failed to make the link between entering the awards and ensuring the long-term health of the design profession by both honouring excellence and nurturing the next generation of designers. Instead, designers are looking at an increasingly expensive awards scheme, being increasingly dominated by advertising and saying ‘no thanks’.

So, what to do?

Entry Fees
Every year someone pipes up that awards should be free to enter and that they can be financed by sponsors. Having worked on a few, that’s just unrealistic. There aren’t enough sponsors with deep enough pockets in this sector to make that even a remote possibility for something on the scale of D&AD: this is about fund-raising for a charity, don’t forget. Entry fees will have to stay in some form, but why not make them cheaper for design? It may seem unfair on other categories, but there is a precedent with the magazine category where prices were lowered in order to increase entries. Ninety percent of design studios in the UK have 5 people or less. They don’t have the self-promotional budgets that ad agencies do and there isn’t such a direct link between winning awards and getting work, retaining staff and so on to make the case for those budgets.

Change the categories
The dismal showing for graphics this year is made to look worse by the category system. There are no winners in Graphics – that just sounds awful. But it doesn’t mean that no graphic designers won awards. Graphic designers produced the Gold-winning work from The Partners and worked on Projector’s Uniqlock blog part. Graphic designers made the Sara Fanelli book, Carl’s Cars and Fantastic Man (all Silver winners, shown below). It’s far from a total wash out for graphic design.

There are reasons why awards shows have categories and not all of them are altruistic. Sure, they help judge like with like and they help organise books or exhibitions. But they are also there to maximise income: 25 categories means 25 opportunities to sell a sponsorship. And they lead to carpet-bombing – people entering the same work across a number of different categories which, of course, is great for the finances of the organisers.

Maybe it’s time to drop the categories and just pick the good stuff no matter where it comes from. In our own Annual we have no categories. To make judging easier, we split the work into disciplines so that we can view all the commercials together rather than watching one, then walking over to look at a poster, then onto a computer. It just makes sense. But the work is not judged in terms of its appropriateness for a category. It’s judged on its own terms as a piece of communication.

Scale down judging and the awards night
Cheaper entry fees and fewer categories mean less revenue, so how would D&AD cope? First, it could introduce a sift – a pre-judging with a different jury to weed out the real no-hopers. We do this on The Annual. In my experience, when judges are faced with a mass of work, nearly all of which, inevitably, is not going to meet their standards, it brings the whole mood down and makes them feel far less positive about the whole experience. Present them with a smaller amount of better quality work and they are more likely to be generous.

A sift would allow D&AD to do the judging in a smaller space and with fewer judges flying in from around the world, thus cutting costs.

Tonight’s awards ceremony broke with tradition by doing away with the sit-down dinner. Instead, the awards were presented in the auditorium at the Royal Festival Hall, with a party afterwards. This allowed D&AD to bring the price of tickets down. Hopefully, the response will be positive. If so, D&AD can perhaps continue down this road and open up the night to those who previously found the cost prohibitive. Two weeks ago I was at the Art Directors Club awards in New York. Winners got a free ticket, extra tickets cost just $50. There was a free bar, food and DJs. OK, so it wasn’t a glitzy production, but there were plenty of designers there.

Re-connect with its audience
The beauty of the ADC is that it has its own, relatively modest, space where not just the awards are held but also a variety of activities throughout the year including talks, conferences, portfolio reviews and so on. This means that every week people are literally coming into contact with the organisation. It has a constant presence in their lives, even if they are only going past it in a cab. Something similar happens at the ICA in London. The idea of having such a venue has been talked about at D&AD – in my opinion, it’s a must.

Explain itself
D&AD is a charity. Its mission is to support and aid the creative industries through promoting excellence and by educating current and future practitioners. It relies on awards entries in order to do this – I’ve always thought of the awards as a levy on the egos of the creative industries. Like the tithe that Christians pay to the church, entering should be seen as an obligation, there to provide for the continued good health of something you believe in. D&AD needs to convince people of this.

Apparently, D&AD was waiting until after the awards to start the process of finding its new chief executive. Whoever is appointed has a lot of work to do.

While an unprecedented six Golds were handed out at last night’s D&AD awards, the Graphic Design section produced just two nominations and no pencils. We asked former D&AD President, Michael Johnson, and Sean Perkins of North why they think graphics was so under-represented (last year seven Silvers and four nominations were awarded in the section) and what D&AD – and indeed the wider design community – should do to change this situation in the future…

(The following discussion appears in the Crit section of the June issue of CR, out next week)

Creative Review: There are 39 projects from the graphic design categories in this year’s Annual, two nominations but, for the first time that we can remember, no Silvers or Golds. Judges have told us that the standard of work entered was “appalling” and that good work featured in other schemes was missing from D&AD, so it doesn’t seem to be simply a case of the graphics sector in general having had a poor year creatively. Does this mean that d&ad is failing to engage the design community? If so, how does it need to change?

Michael Johnson: I’ve been trying to change it for years with varying degrees of success. Last year I helped pick the juries: there were 80 pieces of graphic design in the book and 11 nominations. This year: half the amount in and two nomin­ations. I don’t know what happened with graphics this time.

Sean Perkins: It’s a problem if you get like-minded designers together to judge work – they have to put their name to something. I judged an awards in Spain with Wendelin Hess [of Swiss studio Müller +Hess] and the organisers were complaining there was no packaging in there and we needed to boost the Spanish work. Wendelin said, ‘this is rubbish – if you put this in I’ll go outside and set fire to myself’. He felt that if he had to put his name to the results he wouldn’t choose work just for political reasons. But if you know some­thing is great, you should put it in, even if it’s not to your taste.

MJ: I made a real point of putting contemporary designers on the design jury this time – Philippe Apeloig, Michael C Place, MadeThought….

SP: But on the whole, I’d be surprised if they actually entered work.

MJ: Well, I wanted to say, ‘look, these are the people judging the work’ but something got lost in translation in that the judges – while being recent graduates’ ‘functional heroes’ if you like – didn’t necessarily enter any work themselves. When it got to looking at the work on the tables, some people had very strong opinions about it all. When you raise the bar that high – inadvertently by inviting some of the current ‘superstars’ of design to judge – this can then backfire on you.

SP: But then there are the people who enter everything! There isn’t a discerning ability to self-edit the great work, they’re just hoping to win something. So they just send in lots of average work.

MJ: Yes, some people’s business models are certainly just based on winning awards…. Packaging is pretty good [at D&AD], branding is getting better, but what seems to have happened is that graphics has been slightly sidelined. Perhaps things are going in different directions. Ask most people and they’re not doing many brochures anymore. I’ve done thousands of posters: I did 12 last year. It’s a bit sad isn’t it? But there’s something, and it’s a helicopter view, that maybe feels like a decline [in traditional graphic design]. From emails with some of the judges, some are taking the view that the standard wasn’t good enough this year and that they weren’t prepared to put 16 things in instead of eight even if that meant being perceived as being a bit mean.

Top Publishers won Silver for its title, Fantastic Man, in Magazine & News­paper Design

SP: The other problem is that the Awards doesn’t make you want to belong. I wish it did, that there was something valuable about it to push us, to make us feel threatened or excited, something that cuts through all the politics and averageness…. We all go to websites and see work that we wished we’d done and get inspired. You want to be threatened and inspired like that….

MJ: I think what’s happening is that a certain type of graphic designer isn’t entering D&AD.

SP: Sorry!

MJ: No, I didn’t look at you at that point because you’re a representative of that! It’s just honest. But there is this horrid historical thing about d&ad being seen as having an advertising bias. You can try all you like to fix it….

SP: But then it is wonderful for advertising – as a representation of what’s going on.

DDB Amsterdam won Silver for its Product Recall press ad for VW in Press Advertising

MJ: But people blanket bomb the design section, spend thousands and thousands of pounds entering and it’s now become part of their raison d’être. The Partners won a Gold this year – but not in design. They had to do it by entering into an advertising category. That says it all. They played the system because they probably knew if they entered The Grand Tour into graphic design it wouldn’t get in. But it got into ambient, integrated [and won in poster advertising]. They probably entered that work six times across d&ad. They know what we know: that it’s a lottery when you get work in front of a jury. It’s a great project and deserved to get a Gold – so you can kind of understand their approach. On the other hand, we did some nice stamps last year but could only enter them into one sub-category.

SP: When we entered the Yauatcha work, it didn’t even get in the book. And – without blowing my own trumpet – I thought it was a nice piece of work!

MJ: If you had called me I’d have told you to enter it into this, this and this category….

SP: But we didn’t do it strategically: I thought ‘packaging’ was the right place to put it – people buy a cake and they get it in a box!

Family Business was nominated for its Absolut Disco bottle design, while Mash gained a
Silver for its work for Changing Lanes wine (both in Packaging Design

CR: So do you think there is a problem with the way the judging works?

MJ: Yes: the underlying problem is that the judges are reflected in the work that gets through. If you pick a set of – for want of a better word – ‘ideas’ based jurors, you know what you’re going to get. If you pick ‘functionally’ biased ones you’ll get a different set of results. You get better ‘curated’ shows with smaller judging panels. With three or four people you don’t get the warfare. At d&ad there can be nine judges, with huge splits.

SP: And then you also only get average work: you give something an average score and it’s then the work that doesn’t really offend either party that gets through.

MJ: There are some who’ve really benefited from this ‘compromised candidate’ kind of thing – the work that sits in the middle ground.

SP: But then going round the advert­ising, it does seem very indicative of the year’s work. Maybe that’s because it’s all ‘advertising’ and that’s as complicated as it gets? With our work, you can be designing packaging for a supermarket, a high-end boutique, or you do a corporate identity that isn’t about ‘now’ but about the future, where the brand will be. Advertising is more of a level playing field while design is probably more complex.

Pentagram was nominated for its Saks Fifth Avenue identity in the Branding category

MJ: Also, designers are much worse at picking the best work. The ad community – with all their wars, politics, hatred, jealousy and egos in the industry – are still able to sit there and say, ‘he’s a wanker, but that’s a great piece of work’. The design commun­ity is useless at doing that and is getting worse…. An interesting phenomenon is that the international work often looks fresher. Blogs mean you’ve seen a lot of the work before – so you lose an aspect of it when you encounter it again. You have to be on your game to say, ‘I’ve seen that before and I still think it’s good’ – compared to something from Japan that knocks your socks off immediately but might not look as good in six months. And that’s where the ad industry is better – their work is in the public domain: they all read the same mags, all watch the telly, they don’t fast forward the ads, and they make judgements as they go along. They would have decided at the end of last year that Gorilla is a killer ad and, lo and behold, it wins a Gold. They’d already come to that conclusion.

SP: Yes, every year you know what’s best – like with the Sony Balls commercial.

MJ: Ask graphic designers what the best bit of work from last year was?! But people say that advert­ising’s in decline: yet they’ll give out 35 pencils. Which is like saying ‘we’re sinking guys, but we’ll still give each other pencils’! Design doesn’t seem to be in decline: product and environ­mental designers seem to be ok with saying, ‘nice bit of work’ – but the graphic designers have gone back into their shells. Again. And I’ve never worked out why they do it.

Graphica was nominated for its A Los Invisibles publication in Magazine & Newspaper Design

CR: What about the fact that there are more pieces of work from overseas in D&AD than from the UK?

MJ: If you’re going to sell yourself as the Oscars of advertising and design then this will happen.

SP: I think it’s great, there’s some examples of exciting work. I’m just amazed that they spend that amount of money, that they think it’s a platform that they want to be seen on.

MJ: I think they do what I might do with international schemes, where you’re much tougher on yourself and just enter two things, like to the Tokyo Type Directors Club.

SP: Well, you’re only as good as your worst piece of work – you should just have a bit of self-discipline.

Foam Magazine was nominated in the Magazine & Newspaper Design section

CR: Is the entry fee a big barrier for a lot of studios? Should that be altered at all?

MJ: I think they should halve the entry fee, or make the fee nonexistent. They won’t do it – but make it some­thing like 40 quid? The trouble is the usual suspects will then enter 400 things!

SP: It does all sound so old-fashioned. Take blogs: kids put the work up instantly, they’re not going to wait for somebody to look at it, make an opinion on it, put it into a book eight months, a year after they’ve done it, compared to getting it on the web and celebrating it.

Orion Publishing won Silver for the front covers to its Future Classics series of books

CR: But isn’t the filtration process of an awards important, in that it gives work a value, a stamp? Do designers think differently about that now?

MJ: I think you should devote half of the next issue to asking recent graduates what they think – because I haven’t got a clue. In my late 20s I went along to a D&AD and thought, I’d like to win one of them, they’re clearly a sign of whether you’re any good. And I naively entered into my ‘D&AD life’ thinking one of those means you’re good. I thought that for a long time. But now you’ve got to wonder about that. Even I, as an ex-President of D&AD, am questioning what is the point? And this is partly annoyance at this year – but, also, part of me is thinking maybe I should just move on, just let it go. I like the tdc as well! That’s a beautiful scheme.

SP: Let it go Michael, let it go. We have all the TDC annuals and we still use them, for colour, type, style reference. But I’ve never seen anyone refer to a D&AD Annual.

MJ: Well, to be fair, they do look at them at college.

SP: The tutors should know better than that.

Tate Publishing won Silver for Sara Fanelli’s book, Sometimes I think, Sometimes I Am in Illustration

CR: So D&AD needs to address the fact that graphic design students, looking to see what the best design work is, won’t find it in its Annual?

MJ: If you had a million pounds you’d have an online archive and wouldn’t necessarily need a book. Gradually most of the world’s awards schemes are beginning to understand this.

SP: But it would be exciting for it to mean something. Not that I need an awards system to make me feel good. I suppose it’s our age that means we don’t feel we need to do this, but for the younger designers, they always enjoy it when work gets written about.

MJ: Yes, it does mean something. We might just be jaded middle-aged men. Designers in their mid-to-late 20s: you don’t have to scratch far to see that, yes, some would like to win a pencil.

DDB London won Silver in Art Direction for its Womenswear work for Harvey Nichols

CR: Isn’t D&AD important for other things outside the awards?

SP: It has an amazing educational programme and student awards; the lectures are inspiring – they do a lot of great things that we have to give them respect for. There’s some great ad work voted in and D&AD is the only place to go and see it. But when it comes to graphic design I just feel like I’d never ever look there.

Ena Cardenal de la Nuez’s Object bags for Vinçon, the other nomination in Graphic Design

CR: What do you think of the two pieces of work that were nominated in the graphics section this year? There was the stamp from Hat-Trick Design… (shown, top of page)

SP: The stamp is beautiful. So simple.

MJ: Yes it’s nice. I don’t think it’s worthy of an award though: it’s not doing enough things.

CR: And the Object bags for Vinçon by Ena Cardenal de la Nuez…

MJ: I think I’ve done this before, at least once. They’re kind of sweet but they’re still really just use-of-handle-in-bag-design.

CR: So what’s the way forward?

SP: They’ve got to wipe the slate clean, start again and build something completely different. Do something radical, exciting that we all want to belong to, so we’ll value its opinion and existence. I think let the ad world carry on with D&AD as it stands, just the design bit has to be separate. I love it that Wolff Olins or the Partners can enter into the advertising world – but for me the two worlds have just never been connected. Let’s focus on doing something about design – with a fixed judging panel maybe?

MJ: The only way that this judging system works at the moment is if you’re lucky and the judges get on and they’ve got a really strong foreman, who almost has a foreman’s override. At the moment they don’t have that – but you’ve got to wonder if something like that would be the way to make the system work when you get nine people all together.

SP: Kind of curated, where you have a foreman, like an Alice Rawsthorn, somebody who can override it….

MJ: The other thing to do is have less judges and to put those judges through hell and make them look at 2000 bits of work, which they do do on other schemes. You get your Sagmeister, Perkins, Farrow, and say: ‘you’re gonna come out of this with good work, your job is to find it.’

SP: There’s also that debate aspect: if the judging was a bit more like a discussion so that people could enlighten other people about the work. You’ve got to make people believe in it again – do something radical. Make a lot of noise about doing something different, then do it.

MJ: It’s interesting – he’s not entering and I’m just assuming I’m never going to win again: and what are we, 44? It’s a bit ridiculous. But rather than build from scratch, as the other areas of D&AD are healthy, you’d think there was another way to fix it. It doesn’t work for the designer – so change it. It’s just a bit sad: it stands for Design and Art Direction….

For the full results of the 2008 Awards, see D&AD’s website, dandad.org.

Earlier this evening a record six Black Pencils were handed out in an unprecedented act of judicial generosity at D&AD’s 2008 Awards. Apple scooped two (making it the biggest single winner of the coveted Gold Award to date, with six since 1999) and it was a very good year for advertising categories, with The Partners’ Grand Tour initiative for The National Gallery picking up a Gold; and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Projector Inc. also winning for online campaigns (no Graphics awards though, of which more here and here). Oh and that Gorilla made a brief appearance as well…

Winning Gold in Online Advertising was Projector Inc.’s Uniqlock widget; a downloadable video clock for use on blogs (see CR’s January edition and story here). You can get it here: uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/

The Partners was awarded Gold in Poster Advertising for its Grand Tour campaign for The National Gallery, which saw copies of famous artworks appearing on the streets of London.

Apple did well, securing a black pencil in Product Design for both its latest version of the iMac and, predictably, the iPhone.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ Milk: Get the Glass online game won Gold in the Websites category. The aim of the “advergame” was to help the Adachi family to steal milk from Milkatraz island. Have a go youself, here: gettheglass.com

And finally, Fallon London’s Gorilla commercial for Cadbury’s won a Gold in TV and Cinema Advertising. Well deserved and no surprise, really – we saw that one “coming in the air tonight”. *Sorry*

One question: do so many Golds devalue the currency?

We were never that bothered by chemistry at school - the lab coat being such a tricky look to pull off and all - but maybe if they’d explained it like this we’d have paid more attention…

Directed by Hungry Man’s Roderick Fenske this spot was commissioned by the EU for its Marie Curie programme which provides funding and logistical help to students who study science. Apparently, Fenske’s father was a scientist who impressed upon the young lad that science was never boring if you just talked about it in the right terms. And so he created a humorous metaphor that was not only educational but reminded people about how much fun science could be. Thus was “Chemical Party/Electricity” born.

Hot & Cold is a collaborative art zine project created by Californian artists Chris Duncan and Griffin McPartland. Each issue invites up to 20 artists – with more joining as word spreads – to participate in creating this hand crafted, limited edition zine. A new exhibition of their collected work has just opened in London…

Front cover of an issue of Hot and Cold

Photocopied, stenciled, silk-screened, and stickered since its humble beginnings, Hot & Cold has worked with over 100 artists and has been shown at galleries all over the US. The zine has recently been acquired by New York’s MoMA for their permanent collection and is currently on display at the Zombie Surfers exhibition, at London’s very own Cell Gallery in Bethnal Green.

Hot & Cold issue five

Zines are designed to stand out and often offer an alternative to slick, excessively contrived design. But what makes Hot & Cold remarkable is that it wasn’t a match made in heaven for the duo, who first created the zine in 2002. The fact that Duncan and McPartland are, as artists, aesthetic opposites is a driving concept behind Hot & Cold and is what provides the zine with its addictive charm.

The pair decided at the outset to emphatically agree to disagree about aesthetic direction – hence the title, Hot & Cold, which tells of how two different visions can creatively coexist. A new issue of Hot and Cold is released every three to four months, with copies selling out almost as soon as they are available.

Chris Duncan, one half of Hot & Cold, at work on the Hot and Cold Zines

There’s no theme to each issue of the zine: Duncan and McPartland simply seek pages from artists from within their community whose work they admire. The pages come preprinted and ready to assemble and the pair then package everything into lovingly hand-sewn arrangements with hand-printed covers, tucking in lots of extra tidbits such as buttons, CDs and DVDs. One issue even came with a handmade wallet.

Hot and Cold issue three

Illustration. We’re not sure what it is but it looks great

Duncan and McPartland actively promote the works of the artists who contribute to each zine and with every new issue there’s an accompanying art show, displaying pieces from the zine and artwork made purely for the show, and a launch party are thrown – perfect to get those artists mingling.

Despite their increasing success with the project, it’s actually drawing close to the release of its penultimate issue, as the duo decided from the outset that they would produce only ten issues.

Selected Hot & Colds

Selected Hot & Colds

Duncan and McPartland’s next goal is to publish an anthology of all of the Hot & Cold issues and to curate a comprehensive group show of everyone who has ever contributed to the zine (if you’re in the US, this is definitely something to look out for).

Selected Hot & Colds

Hot and Cold zines on display at the Cell Gallery’s Zombie Surfers exhibition,
made out to look like a beach hut

A collection of Hot and Cold zines are on display in London at Cell Gallery’s Zombie Surfers exhibition which runs until June 2.

More at the Hot & Cold Massive website.

Whether from rapacious property developers or the internet, the independent record shops of London’s Soho are under threat. Barely a month goes by without another one disappearing. Designer Ali Augur and photographer Spencer Murphy decided to document these musical treasure troves and their owners before they become a distant memory.

Independent: A Celebration of Soho’s Independent Record Shops, opens this Friday at 63 Broadwick Street in London. The show’s main focus is a series of eight photographic portraits of record shop owners in situ in their shops - from junglist hero Nicky Blackmarket at BM Soho to Harold Moores Records - taken by Murphy, although it was Augur who kickstarted the project.

Another shot of the interior of Harold Moores Records

“It all started when I first heard the lyrics of Earl Zinger’s Saturday Morning Rush,” explains Augur. Zinger’s track describes in glorious detail the journey of an obsessive vinylphile as he rushes around London, from shop to shop on a Saturday morning trying, increasingly desperately, to get a copy of the latest hot release, before rushing home so he can get ready to go to a wedding. “The track came out around the time I was doing flyers for Plastic People in 2002,” Augur continues, “and I knew all the record shops mentioned in the song so listening to it conjured up vivid imagery. It made me really aware that things were changing as some of the shops were disappearing practically as soon as the record was released. Things change so quickly, blink and you’ll miss it and I’m really interested in that.

“So I thought - I’m going to illustrate the lyrics to that track and I contacted Rob (Earl Zinger) Gallagher and he was really up for it. Even at the time there was an air of threat over some of the shops like Atlas and Release The Groove and everyone was having a bit of a tough time. But I didn’t get round to doing it. I kicked myself every time I heard something was changing, a shop was closing. Shit, that moment has gone. I didn’t do anything about it but then, when Reckless Records on Berwick Street shut, about a year ago, that’s when I thought - ‘I can still do something, there’s still time’.”

Interior of Sister Ray on Berwick Street

Through his contacts in advertising and at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, where he works as a designer, Augur contacted photographer Spencer Murphy who was up for getting involved. “I took two days holiday from work,” says Augur, “Spencer took time out, borrowed equipment and we approached the shops and decided to do eight. We could have done more but decided to keep the project within the geographical marker of Soho. We shot eight portraits in two and a half days last December.”

Portrait of junglist Nicky Blackmarket inside BM Soho

While Augur art directed the shoots, he admits he didn’t have much to do. “The guys in the shots were naturally framed because there’s something in front of them (the shop front in most cases), they’re surrounded by their stuff and so from an art direction perspective, it really was very easy! I was half expecting some of the shots not to work - but they all did. Working with Spencer on this was amazing.”

Augur has also created a set of limited edition posters, which are folded and housed in a seven inch card sleeve, numbered and stamped on the back in an edition of 400. “I took a lot of time out to get the posters right. [Printers] Quadroprint did a great job too with it because the poster is folded in an unusual way, there’s a spot varnish, they made the seven inch sleeves too – and they made sure that the poster lined up perfectly with the circular hole in the card sleeve.”

Ali Augur designed a folding poster that includes all the photography and an introduction to the project by Time Out’s Cyrus Shahrad. Limited to 400 stamped and numbered editions the poster comes in a seven inch record sleeve

There is also a set of eight flyers - each one showing one of the eight portraits on one side and info about the exhibition on the reverse. Each flyer can be found in the relevant record shop. “This makes them collectible and hopefully will drive people to the other shops,” he explains.

Note the logo for Snorkel on the above flyers. Snorkel is the collective enthusiasm of a group of people at ad agency BBH where Augur works - that includes Mark Reddy and Fred Uribe Mosquera. Its objective is to “develop interesting projects that hopefully stimulate and delight”

Since the shoot, two of the record shops have closed. “Mister CD shut down about three weeks after we were in the shop taking the shot – and then If Music closed about a month ago,” Auger tells us. “Both shops are still trading online but the shops themselves are gone.”

Sadly no more – one of the decks available for customers to use in If Records, which closed last month

“Actaully another thing happened a couple of months ago,” adds Augur. “You know the bottom of Berwick Street, opposite Somerfields? That bottom corner has been demolished. It’s gone. We’ve got some photographs of that building but it’s completely gone now. So while the project’s about six years late, it’s incredible to think that since we took the shots, two of the shops have gone and the bottom of Berwick Street has disappeared. I’m really glad I finally got round to doing the project.”

The old shop front of Deal Real records. Now the store is located at 3 Marlborough Court, just off Carnaby Street

Independent: A Celebration of Soho’s Independent Record Shops runs from 16 – 24 May at 63 Broadwick Street, London W1

Here’s a round-up of recent advertising work that has caught our eye here at CR Towers. First up is director Danny Kleinman’s latest for Specsavers, which, considering it’s for an optician, is really rather chilling.

Animated short for the Alfa Romeo Mito, directed by Andy Martin

Next is this delightful animated spot from director Andy Martin (who has just signed to Strange Beast for UK and European representation). Martin was commissioned to do the spot by Qoob.tv. Quicktime is here.

Nike Next Level ad, agency: 72andSunny, director: Guy Ritchie

Guy Ritchie has directed this new spot for Nike, which is actually surprisingly good…

BT Business Gremlins ad, production company: Blink, director: Dougal Wilson

Nostalgia is big business these days, as we all know perhaps too well. Some things are well worth revisiting, however, such as the Gremlins film, whose scary-but-cute monsters make a comeback in this ad for BT, directed by Dougal Wilson. They are seen causing hilarious havoc in the office of (slightly random this bit) Dragon Den’s Peter Jones. Quicktime is here.

Bee Boy ad for Honeycomb, agency: Ogilvy, Toronto, production company: Sons and Daughters, Toronto, director: Tim Piper

Over to Canada now and this frankly bizarre ad for Honeycomb cereal from Ogilvy, Toronto. It’s directed by Tim Piper, who co-directed last year’s Dove Evolution spot (also from Ogilvy, Toronto). Quicktime here.

Mandy & Lester short film from the Responsibility Project for Liberty Mutual. Production company: RSA Films, director: Lena Beug

Insurance is never the easiest product to advertise in an interesting way but RSA Films‘ link up with US insurance company Liberty Mutual has come up with something a little more innovative. The collaboration has produced four new short films for Liberty Mutual’s The Responsibility Project, a branded content website that delivers unique content based on the theme of personal responsibility. The four shorts are all directed by RSA Films directors, and include Mandy & Lester by Lena Beug, shown above.

Christian Aid Week ad, agencies: Shop/eBoy

Christian Aid Week takes place this week, and the charity’s latest ad could scarcely be more timely considering the recent natural disasters in Burma and China. The ad emphasises how Christian Aid donations are used to help with international relief and development, but instead of using typically hard-hitting imagery, the ads are created in eBoy’s trademark animated style.

RC Scorpion ad, agency: Ogilvy London

Finally, we end with a print campaign from Ogilvy London, which demonstrates that RC Scorpion remote control cars are so tough, they turn other toys into roadkill. Even poor Bambi.

RC Scorpion ad, agency: Ogilvy London

Is the above from a new series of artworks by a contemporary designer, an explosion of scientific data, or a photograph of a strange creature discovered by deep-sea biologists? Well, while most of the following images are just crying out to be placed on a T-shirt, they actually have little to do with design, fashion, photography or art, and much more to do with cyberspace…

“The Blogosphere” (for the uninitiated) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs and their interconnections, based on the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community. The data displayed in these images was provided by the blog search engine, Blogpulse, and represents a month’s worth of data collected from the entire blogosphere. These Blogpulse “maps” were each produced by Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs and co-creator of Blogpulse.

Each one represents the “blogosphere” and was designed to show the relationships between weblogs. Within the maps, each “node” represents a weblog and the links between them represent the existence of citations e.g. where A cites B and B cites A – there is a reciprocal link. The maps are then laid out by inspecting the reciprocal links within the graphs and adding in those nodes (blogs) that are linked close to each other.

This image depicts the core of the blogosphere. The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links.

This image is essentially the same as the above but with the nodes added. The size of the nodes represents the number of “inlinks” to the blog. The colours represent the URL – blogs hosted at the same domain have the same colour.

What emerges through this process is what’s referred to as the “community structure of the blogosphere”. Groups of weblogs that have a lot of interlinking are located nearer to each other. This often occurs when there is some commonality among the weblogs (e.g. by topic, or by geographic location).

From that set Hurst has pulled out what he calls the “core of the blogosphere” – this is the largest group of connected weblogs which are, generally, focussed on tech/web 2.0 type subjects and politics.

While these strangely organic-looking diagrams are based on hard statistics and technical data, it’s satisfying to think that this very post might in some way help generate another of Hurst’s stunning creations.

A “Hyperbolic” display of blogs

More information on blogospheres can be found at Matthew’s website Data Mining: Mapping the Blogosphere.

Despite the protests, Olympic fever is slowly starting to build, and the exhibitions are beginning. This weekend, at the V&A Museum of Childhood in London, a show looking at 100 years of Olympic posters will open which will run (no pun intended…) over the summer to coincide with the Beijing Games. Here are a few extracts from the selection that will be shown - included are posters by artists such as R B Kitaj, as well as much-loved design classics such as Lance Wyman’s poster for the Mexico 68 Olympics, shown above.

The V&A is also publishing a book of the posters, by Margaret Timmers, which includes a detailed history of why the official posters were chosen, reactions to them, and how the posters reflected the political and cultural atmosphere of the times. And it’s not all about the summer Olympics either, the Winter Games also get a look in too.

A Century of Olympic Posters opens at the Museum of Childhood on May 17 and continues until September 7. More info on the book and exhibition can be found at vam.ac.uk/moc/.

Barcelona 92 poster by Josep Maria Trias, © courtesy IOC/V&A

Munich 72 poster by R B Kitaj, © estate of the artist, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art/IOC/V&A

Chamonix Mont-Blanc Winter Games 1924 poster by Auguste Matisse, © V&A

Los Angeles 1984 poster by April Greiman and Jayme Odgers, ©1984 Olympics/the artists/IOC/V&A

London 1948 poster by Walter Herz, © courtesy IOC/V&A

Berlin 1936 poster by Franz Würbel, © IOC/V&A

The May issue of Creative Review (above) features 100 pages of work selected for this year’s Annual. The very best of those make up our Best In Book section: details of the winners here…

This year’s Best In Books are:

Mini Clubman interactive ads by Glue London
Glue London was behind the online launch of the classic Mini Clubman, creating a series of interactive spots that highlighted the car’s elongated shape, its handling and the quirkiness particular to the Clubman brand (check them out here. “To show it off in the best possible light, we did a bespoke one-day shoot for the rich media formats,” says Glue. “High production values are always important to us, whatever format we’re working in and especially with a product like this. We also concentrated on getting the right level of interaction so we could engage people without asking them to do too much. Superglue, our interactive film team, did a great job of bringing it all to life in a very tight timeframe.” The interactive work plays on the idea that ‘things aren’t always what they seem’ and, in one example featuring a scrolling 360º view of the new model, the chunky rear of the car breaks through the actual frame of the ad. In another spot the preconceptions of the Mini’s size are dispelled as what seems to be a model of the car approaches a tiny, looping race track, only for it to be demolished under the full size wheels of the real thing.

Cadbury’s Gorilla by Fallon London/Blink Productions
Undoubtedly the most talked/blogged about commercial of last year, Gorilla hardly needs any further words of explanation. But, for any readers that haven’t experienced the spot, it was a 90-second number for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk that employed the surprising combination of Phil Collins, a drum kit and a talented gorilla. Was it actually Phil in a gorilla outfit? Was it a real gorilla playing drums? These and many other questions abounded after this well-observed spot aired, whilst In the Air Tonight was suddenly reborn in the collective memory (along with the opportunity to shout “Woah Lord” and pump a fist in pleasure). And that’s what the joyous spot was all about – raising a smile.

Things I have learned in my life so far, Sagmeister inc.
Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far is a monograph of work that has been made by the designer since his “experimental year” in 2000, when he took time out from creating commercial projects. During that year, Sagmeister devised a list of maxims (such as ‘Everything I do comes back to me’ and ‘Worrying solves nothing’), which, despite their personal and philosophical nature, quickly became incorporated into work for clients when his office reopened. The book details 20 of these projects in a collection of separate booklets, all housed in a die-cut slipcase. Readers can create alternate outer covers by shuffling the booklets. The work produced from the maxims appears in wildly varying forms, and has been published all over the world in spaces normally reserved for advertising or promotions; on billboards, magazine spreads, and even on the cover of an annual report. “They are all made for different clients and different countries, yet form a coherent series and it made sense to make a book about them,” says Sagmeister. Alongside the artwork, Sagmeister explains the story behind each maxim in the book, offering an insight into his personal experiences and the way that he works, as well as how the maxim came to be used for an individual client.

Chocolate Man by Vegaolmosponce
Quite why Lynx has created a deodourising body spray that smells like chocolate may well be completely beyond the comprehension of many of our readers. But create such a product Lynx has and this spot, Chocolate Man, created by Buenos Aires-based agency Vegaolmosponce, promotes it memorably in time-honoured Lynx tradition. In the ad, a young man sprays himself with the stuff one morning and promptly transforms into a man made entirely of chocolate. At Creative Review we’ve never seen young women pout and rub themselves suggestively in the presence of chocolate, but as this is Lynx, Chocolate Man is irresistible to any ladies (and there are many) in his path. One by one they helplessly succumb to the protagonist’s chocolatey charms, biting his bum on the tube, nibbling his face in the cinema, laughing flirtatiously at the notion of eating his fingers. A particularly brazen group of chocolate-crazed women even break off one of his arms in a drive-by scenario as he cheerily waves to a gym full of wanton chocolate-loving hussies. “I’m not sure you could have had as much fun or been as risqué if the man had not been made out of chocolate,” notes Annual jury member Paul Cohen of AMV BBDO. “The chocolate man is a great place to get to in the context of what the product has come to stand for.”

Fabric posters by Village Green
“Fabric tends to like its visuals to lean towards the darker end of the spectrum,” says design studio Village Green’s Tom Darracott, the designer behind this range of striking posters for the London-based nightclub. “My intention was to create a series of characters rather than a series of images of people wearing masks,” says Darracott. “I wanted these characters to seem ‘believable’ even though the masks they’re wearing are entirely fantastical.” All of the masks were handmade at Village Green with only minor retouching done in post-production. Darracott created one mask that touched on pagan ancestry (the Green Man) and a vibrant red creation that was based on Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes for Bauhaus theatre productions. For the final mask in the series, Darracott wanted to reference the plague doctors who tended to the victims of the 17th century disease that swept through London. “The long snout would have been stuffed with aromatic herbs and flowers in the belief that the pungent fragrance would protect the wearer from the disease,” says Darracott. “I’d read that the Smithfield area of London, where Fabric is located, was heavily hit by the outbreak and was also home to a number of plague burial sites or ‘plague pits’, so it’s a bit of a historical tribute to the area.”

Orange Unlimited website by Poke
Poke was briefed by mobile communications company Orange to design something to promote its Unlimited range of products, which use the tagline, ‘Good things should never end’. Poke’s solution was to create what it claims is the world’s first infinite website. “We hoped that the idea of a never-ending web page would intrigue people,” says Poke’s Iain Tait, “and that once people arrived at the site, we’d manage to keep them engaged by throwing loads of quirky and playful bits and bobs at them. It seemed to work.” A host of blobby cartoon characters inhabit the site and there are games, puzzles and chat facilities to play with along the way. But scroll as you might, the path down the descending rainbow never ends and the layout of the page is never the same twice (see the site here).

Procrastination by Johnny Kelly
Director Johnny Kelly, now signed to London-based production company Nexus, created his animated film Procrastination while still an MA student at the Royal College of Art. Procrastination is, in Kelly’s own words, “a hands-on, gloves-off study into the practice of putting things off”, and is as visually engaging as it is universally topical. We’re all familiar with the fine art of doing something else other than that which is most pressing and Kelly’s film sees him employ a variety of animation techniques as it works through a list of the various forms that procrastination can take, each announced to superb comic effect by voiceover artist Bryan Quinn. “We were asked to produce a film on a topic of our choice and given a year to do it – so Procrastination came out of the struggles I was having with such an open brief,” explains Kelly of his choice of subject. “Eventually I stopped floundering around with worthy concepts and overworking ideas and just started making sequences based on my own personal experience.”

Skoda Cake by Fallon London
Hugely popular, Fallon’s Cake ad for Skoda depicts a group of white-coated home economists busily making a full-size car – out of cake. Real cake. Yes, over a ton of ingredients (1,238.5 kilograms to be precise) were used – along with 180 eggs – to create the cake car for real. To make the ad, Fallon pulled together an impressive team that included one of the best production designers in the film industry, six home economists, three sugar chefs, a machine operator/baker, two prop masters and four SFX modelmakers – all of whom make an appearance in the finished ad. But what happened to the cake-car afterwards? Despite plans to cut the cake up and distribute it to local charities, schools and hospitals, production designer Brian Morris explained to us why none of it was eaten: “Unfortunately, as the car had been under hot studio lights for several days, it would have posed a health and safety risk if eaten. Some parts were preserved though, such as the marzipan wing-mirrors and chocolate speedometer. The rest of the car, I hear, was composted and will be used by the residents of Clapton, East London, to fertilise their gardens and allotments.”

zzz is playing: grip music video by Roel Wouters
Roel Wouters’ video for the band zZz was the first made by the Amsterdam-based designer-artist-filmmaker, yet it quickly wowed Nexus Productions in London, who signed Wouters for representation at the end of last year, as well as us at Creative Review. Wouters became one of our Creative Futures this year largely on the strength of this video, alongside his other film and design projects. Part of the appeal of the video is the fact that it was recorded live, in one take. It was filmed as part of the opening of the exhibition Nederclips at the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch SMS in The Netherlands, and sees trampo­lining gymnasts simulating typical video editing effects, shot from above. “The important criteria were that the audience at the opening would be able to witness the whole shoot, and that the video clip would be added to the exhibition immediately after the shoot,” Wouters explains. “This meant that we had no option to reshoot or edit if something went wrong, which made the whole crew so focused that we performed even better than any of us imagined.” Among the effects that are simulated in the video are the loading bar at the bottom of an Mpeg, created by someone painting a line on the floor, as well as the all-too-familiar Apple spinning wheel. Technology has rarely looked as charming. See more of Wouters’ work here .

Tide Interview by Saatchi & Saatchi New York
This ad isn’t a big blockbuster of a commercial, but the Annual jury was really taken with it. The ad shows a rather stern-looking gentleman seated behind a desk interviewing a job applicant. As soon as said applicant responds to the questions posed by his potential employer, his voice is drowned out by a stream of vocal yabbering, rendering his reply totally incomprehensible. When he stops talking, so does the annoying chitter-chatter. Another question is posed and, once again, the young hopeful’s response is accompanied by senseless jibber-jabber – to which he seems completely oblivious. Only now the viewer can see that a rather unsightly stain on the interviewee’s shirt is the source of the extra noise and is even animated to look as if it has a talking mouth. Then comes the strapline: ‘Silence the stain’. Wonderfully shot and brilliantly cast, this is engaging and funny stuff for a distinctly unglamorous product.

The Annual issue of CR is on sale now