Zig zag
Michael Johnson talks about zagging where others zig — using a counterintuitive idea as the basis of a design solution.
It’s not easy to stir up the normally unflappable world of identity design, where the graphic arts come close to an exact, rule-based science. But don’t tell that to Michael Johnson.
In recent years, Johnson’s London-based company, johnson banks, has acquired a reputation for creating identities that violate every expectation, or, as he puts it, that zag where others zig. “I think the baseline is that there are all sorts of ways you’re supposed to do the job,” he says, “and I don’t believe in any of that. I think standard procedures produce standard design.”
Contrarianism has long been a familiar role for Johnson. After spending his 20s “getting fired” from various jobs, he established his own company in 1992, when the United Kingdom was in the heart of a deep recession. It was a terrible time to open a business, but Johnson soon found his niche.
“The foolproof rule of exhibition and gallery graphics is ‘Pick the best object and use it everywhere.’ But the revamp of the British Galleries at the V&A contained 400 years of the finest British furniture, art, and interior design ever collected. Picking one was going to be tough. So we picked six instead and let the visitor imagine what wearing, leaning on, or snogging in front of all these treasures might feel like.”
One of his first jobs involved creating a catalog for a luxury watch manufacturer. But rather than displaying the watches in a traditional manner, with beauty shots against a black background, Johnson proposed putting them on the arms of nuns and bikers — the very people who would never be able to afford them.
“The client immediately said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the idea,’” he remembers, “and that was a breakthrough for me.”
Of course, Johnson’s methodology doesn’t completely turn identity design on its head. In many respects, johnson banks executes a project like any other firm. The typical process begins in meetings, lots of meetings. He and his team will spend weeks, if not months, mastering a client’s needs — and sometimes helping discover them.
“This project began in the ’90s under the general brief of ‘stamps for children,’ spent three years in a drawer marked ‘maybe,’ and then was revived in time to be updated to match with new technology, allowing each stamp and sticker to be kiss cut onto self-adhesive paper.’
“We wanted to find a way to make stamps ‘interactive’ and interesting, not just pretty perforated squares in the corner of your letter. Then we stumbled on the idea of ‘fuzzy felt faces’ and ‘Potato Head’ as stamps and made a kit comprising ten bits of fruit and veg and 76 die-cut stickers. The philatelic community was suitably enraged, but we can live with that. Someone once described these as the ‘true democratization of design,’ where each of the 500,000 senders designs their own stamp each time. We just thought they were fun.”
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