For me, the joy of Dark Mofo is in the purity of a single idea, beautifully and consistently and unwaveringly executed across every brand touchpoint. Even as I use the word ‘brand’ I shudder, as I’m sure anyone working at DarkLab – the creative studio for Dark Mofo – might. It seems such an inappropriately mundane word for such a fuck-you festival. Be this as it may, the attention to detail, everywhere, is simply astonishing. It’s in your pre-festival experience – the instagrams and e-newsletters beautifully considered both in design and expertly-written content. The enigmatic text messages inviting you to be part of something ‘secret’ -  if you wish, putting a smile on your face before you’ve even packed your smalls. It’s in the enigmatic message greeting you atop the terminal building, before you’ve even steeled yourself with a deep breath and stepped off the plane.

It’s in the wayfinding, signage and graphics all around town, it’s in the toilets of the ferry terminal with its lighting altered to the distinctly red Dark Mofo glow. It’s in the choice and colour of materials that dress the spaces, the curtains, the lighting, the bar menu, the horses taking people for a canter around town. The goddamn horses, people! They were sporting pointy red devil’s ears.

More than any of that. I’m astonished at the level of local buy-in. As you gaze around Hobart, you can see commercial and private buildings all getting into the Dark Mofo spirit. The atrium of the Telstra building is lit up like some ghastly red horror movie scene, as are its neighbours. Dotted about, here and there, they have all decided to join the party – presumably masking their current lighting with red filters or replacing with red bulbs. But here’s the thing. It’s not just any red filter. It’s THE Dark Mofo red. Everywhere. No-one is slightly ‘pink’ or gone for a rusty-red, it’s the luscious, distinctive, blood-curdling Dark Mofo red.

I’d love to know, are they all supplied with PMS-matched red filters? Have Dark Lab gone to the extent and expense of distributing brand kits across town? And even if they have, how come there are no rogue elements? Or are Hobartians intuitively blessed with on-brand design nous?  Whatever…the fact that it is all consistent astounds me.

The devil is in the detail, as they say. Bravo Creative Director Leigh Carmichael and team. Joyful. Simply, joyful.

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Today is International Women’s Day…

There will, no doubt, be plenty of articles written about the working and home lives of women, and how inequalities and prejudices are still all too common. How research shows that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women (when a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less). How women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world.  Least of all in government –  women make up less than 18% of all government ministers in the world. How, when a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does x2 the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does x3 the amount of childcare than the man.

You’ll read much of that elsewhere. However, I want to focus on our industry. The creative industries must be better, right? With our progressive attitudes and predilection towards non-conformity? I have to say, my own experiences don’t paint a pretty picture, nor did a quick canvas around my female friends and colleagues in the industry.

A few examples...

Early on in my career as one of the professional ‘public faces’ of a top tier architectural practice I was asked, instead, if I would cover reception on lunch breaks for a while. Surprised to be asked, but young and new and wanting to seem obliging, I agreed. That was until it was pointed out to me by a senior female in the practice that there were plenty of people that could have been asked. Many more junior, freelancers, contractors. That it might not give the greatest impression to our regular visiting contacts, if I was greeting them on reception, only to then hold a meeting with them. Plenty of other options in fact, but….male. They were not asked. As an aside, a recruiter I know in the gaming industry was recently asked to hire a receptionist, female only ”under 30 with big boobs.”

Or the MD of an agency who had a wonderful talent for hiring women and being super-friendly with them in the workplace, yet clearly didn’t take them or their work seriously. It never “quite worked out” having senior women in the agency.  It was clear that they were perceived to be a little ‘pushy’, mirroring the findings of a recent US study that found that women who are seen as nice, modest and self-effacing lack ‘executive presence’. But if they’re hard-driving or ambitious, they’re ‘unlikeable’.

The MD, who, after a dalliance with one of his female members of staff at the office Christmas party was heard saying shortly after “well, I suppose I could always fire her”.

The Chairman and Partners of a practice, who were heard guffawing at the existence of a Women’s Prize for Architecture, “I mean, what on earth are they going to win – a lifetime’s supply of tights?”

The Partner of a practice who, when conducting an Annual Review with a senior female architect who was asking for a pay rise, exclaimed “What on earth do you need that for, your husband is minted, he works in Property!” Speaking of which, data released only last week in the 2016 AR Women in Architecture Survey, show significant discrepancies among male and female salaries at the top of the profession. UK men at director, partner or principal level are earning 31% more. For the creative industries as a whole, the figure from the Office for National Statistics shows a 12% salary gender gap. People – this is more than four and a half decades after the Equal Pay Act was introduced!

But, wait, there is some good news!

Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility for childcare have half the divorce rate. They also have more sex. Is that good enough motivation for everyone?

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Stunning Ghost Stories album artwork

The new Coldplay album artwork for Ghost Stories showcases a stunning collection of etchings by artist Mila Fürstová. Now available to view as a full-length animation, along with the opportunity to listen to the album for free ahead of its release on 19 May!

It’s wonderful when nice people get the opportunity to do great things. And so it is with my friend Mila. A talented UK-based Czech artist known for her beautiful etchings, Mila has been secretly beavering away for the last year on this artwork for Ghost Stories - Coldplay’s sixth studio album. What a fabulous commission! How on earth did she manage to keep it a secret?!

Artwork for ‘Magic’, Coldplay

Included here you can see both the cover art for the Coldplay single Magic released on 3 March 2014, and the Coldplay album cover itself. The Coldplay album is due for release on 19 May 2014 (you can pre-order on iTunes).

The single art for Magic features a symbolic white dove imposed onto a blue canvas. Contained within the perimeter of the dove is a scenario featuring imagery related to stage magic, including a levitating couple, a flying deck of cards and a theatre stage. The level of detail is just gorgeous…

Angel wings, medieval art-driven artwork

For the Coldplay album artwork cover, the medieval art-driven artwork features a pair of angel wings imposed onto a painting of an ocean under a sky at night. The angel wings themselves feature cryptic imagery of medieval-style drawings including a couple in love, a man facing a mirror, a flight of white doves, a circular maze, a girl by candelight, a window looking out onto an incoming tornado and a garden plant with a ladder. You can zoom in to a larger version of the artwork on Coldplay’s official website, using a screen magnifier – definitely worth doing!

If you fancy one to hang on your wall, or even as a tattoo (the current reproduction of choice on the Coldplay Facebook page right now!), you can buy the artwork through Album Artists, from 19 May.

Images courtesy of Mila Fürstová.

Watch the Coldplay album artwork for Ghost Stories in the Magic video

This blog post is one of a series of design blog posts by design writer Jackie Hawkins.

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Indesign_Issue44_DIYKyoto_JHawkins

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Less Mouth, More Trousers[1]

As Emily Dickinson famously wrote ‘being a poet is all. Being known as a poet is nothing.’ Can the same be said about designers? Today you can’t pick up a fork, sit on a seat, switch on a light, open a bottle or pick your nose without someone’s name being attached to it (OK, so I made the last one up, but give it time…give it time). But why? And how do designers feel about being known largely for their name, over their work?

The phenomenon of the ‘named designer’ has been traced back to the explosion of mass consumption in post war Britain. It was a way of individualizing mass-produced consumer products when consumption was becoming a bit of a blur. Fifty years on and products couldn’t have been further removed from the factory floor, appearing in art galleries and museums. French cultural theorist Bourdieu addressed the cultural significance of this move in relation to photography, claiming that photographs became ‘endowed with the dignity of works of art.’ It’s difficult not to concede that exactly the same thing has happened with product design, when the work of Lovegrove, Dixon, Boontje and the like has appeared in galleries all over the world. Even Heatherwick Studio, who arguably fall more into the structural/experimentalist camp recently showcased their extruded benches at the über trendy Haunch of Venison gallery in London. Known for representing Turner Prize nominees, you can’t get much closer to the art world than that. The trouble is, as Max Fraser sees it, that there is a danger of design taking itself too seriously, appearing ‘culturally highbrow. Let’s not forget that it’s only furniture!’

So, why do we seem so obsessed with knowing the name of a person behind the product, and are designers happily complicit in the ‘designer’ economy? “It’s all a bag of bollocks isn’t it? I’d be happy if I didn’t talk to another journalist again, I just want to get on with my work and that’s all that interests me” chimed one prominent personality at 100%Design in London, but in the same breath asked not to be identified as he conceded that it would be biting off the hand that feeds him. Having his face in magazines helps bring in new work. Thomas Heatherwick finds it all very curious “its interesting that one is seen as being available to comment on anything in the world. There is an expectation that someone creative just loves to talk, that they’re an auto-entertainment machine.” I wonder then how he might feel about Twitter and blogging ‘I feel a bit fatigued by the whole Pecha Kucha thing that everyone is desperate to talk…I don’t want to pontificate. I don’t want to be a pundit, commenting on a million things, showing you my home.”

There are those who are not naturally predisposed to being thrust into the limelight. My former employer, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, a man ironically celebrated for his grand gestures of scale and proportion, who played homage to Brunel and Paxton at Paddington Station and Waterloo, was a man it appeared to me most happiest pottering in his office. Absorbed in his thoughts, with his characteristic round glasses perched precipitously mid-forehead (a disguise, an object beyond which he could hide no doubt) I began to think of him much like a mole that would come up to sniff the air from time to time and was only kept from his daily discombobulating by the irksome requests from the Media Department for him to commit to some new T.V. programme or radio show.

There is no doubt that the media are partly to blame. In the words of Baudrillard, ‘the media toss around sense and nonsense, they manipulate in every sense at once.’ We are all guilty of attaching significance to the provenance. This consecration by celebrity clearly does much to raise the profile of the project and the profession, while in parallel lending prestige to the client earning them cultural caché. With design being such an important part of the UK economy contributing £60bn a year – 7.3 per cent, with growth at twice the rate of the economy as a whole during the last decade, its hard to deny that it has its uses.

The difficulty is, that attributing one name to a product can often have us shifting uncomfortably in our (designer) seats. It is disrespectful to the contribution of the ‘team’ that did their fair share in creating it. The Millennium Bridge was famously reported as being the brainchild of Sir Norman Foster, even though Arup were the lead consultant, and somehow the sculptor Anthony Caro, not to mention the minions at all three studios, were forgotten along the way. “Whenever I talk about our projects, I always say ‘we’ (Heatherwick Studio) because that is how it is. Yes I’m a key ingredient in the collaboration, but design is very much an iterative process. There’s a real culture at the moment of the ‘genius’ or ‘sole creator’. In reality, I doubt there are very few out there.” I suggest that this might present a skewed image to new students “Yes, I think it is dangerous, it puts enormous pressure on students that they have to be this ‘hero’ person instead of being an important part of a mix. The process of thinking really comes alive when working with others.”

Like it or not, designers have become brands just like anything else. Look at Jasper Morrison, his name is a big as designers get, his products enjoy huge commercial success. Yet his success seems to have been tempered by feelings of malaise, as he revealed in a recent rare interview with Icon Magazine, claiming that design has become ‘a major source of pollution’ referring to the fact that some designers seem to design for magazine covers rather than designing for life, with the effect that ‘people don’t trust design, they think its shit – nine times out of ten you’re better of to buy an ordinary corkscrew than a designer corkscrew just because ordinary corkscrews know what they’re doing’. Like Heatherwick, Morrison is concerned about the new generation ‘Young students see what gets published and imagine that that’s what is design’.

You could argue that we are damaging our own industry. Our compulsion to add a branded stamp that presumably was initially intended as a mark of quality, has become a meaningless ‘show’, wrapped up in the all-pervasive overbearing reportage of recent times and obsession with endorsement by celebrity. Somewhere along the lines, the good quality less ‘sexy’ design that problem-solves and functions well, has got a bit lost in the fanfare of marketing noise. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because the media as a force that constructs and re-circulates cultural meaning of the role, status and practice of design, chooses not to concentrate on it.

So, what for the future? There appears to be an increased ennui with the usual fare found at design exhibitions and graduate shows in recent months: chairs and bookcases with designer labels attached. The current economic climate is perhaps partly responsible; we are questioning now more than ever the ‘necessity’ for the things around us. Certainly there is a lot of increasing dialogue on designing with ‘usefulness’ in mind: note the interest paid to a recent graduate’s re-think of the common household UK plug, and the achievement of a urine receptacle for women – the Peezy – winning ‘Best of Show’ at the Design Week Awards in London recently.

Part of the problem is that we as journalists contribute to the mystification of designed objects by showing them gleaming and smiling for the camera in pristine condition, forgetting that these are merely objects, devices by which we engage in humble activities like sitting, eating or entertaining. There is a whole fascinating revealing iterative process behind the finished result involving input from a range of disciplines that we almost never get to hear about. Why not report on the human experience of designing? And what about getting deep down and dirty with materials and production processes and techniques? Let’s see more on the process I say, right from sheet metal to manufacture, from squiggly lines on paper to presentation. By demystifying design in this way we show that design is, more often than not, a collaborative process, ‘hands-on’ and not about ‘sole creation’ or effortless endeavour.

I hope to see more of a focus on designing with social change in mind, taking quality and longevity more seriously and be less about fashion and disposability. I look forward to a time when we admire the combination of effort from designers and end users on issues that are of far more importance and relevance to most of us in the real world, like safety, transport, crime and climate change. Less chairs and more problem solving please. Less fashion and more durability. Less disposability, and more re-use. Less emulation and more innovation. Less adulation and more common sense.

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