One D or Two?

uh I just wanted to make some things uh clear before we begin uh I'm not a

designer also I'm not a technologist and I remember when uh the email invite came

through I was sort of thinking why have they asked me to come and talk about digital design and uh the sort of finger

was going down on the delete button slowly uh when I suddenly um you know I

saw a list of speakers as well and I was going wow uh I'm really going to make a fool of myself and uh I thought I

suddenly thought of a reason I am a human and I think most uh design and

technology is for humans uh so digital design and the

first thing that bothers me about this is the uh 2DS um I don't think we should be

talking about digital design any longer I think we should just be talking about design uh and it worries me when uh it

kind of gets split up into too many categories I think there's been this war that's been going on between designers

uh the design communities and this sort of techn Technology Rebels who have grown up over the last sort of 30 40

years and uh I don't think it's very very healthy I think when you think about you know these are some of these

are old quotes and stuff but I think you know computers are design as microwaves are cooking molon Glazer graphic

designers find themselves in a role of visual dishwashers for the information architect chefs Gess Swanson which I

think a lot of people feel uh and then you get the inventor of the worldwide web who says web users ultimately want

to get at data quickly and easily they don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty

design and uh I sort of think if my dad was here who never got a hold of

Technology really um he would probably side with Tim berners Lee uh he uh actually was an engineer

and uh worked and sort of designed lawnmowers but most of his life the back end of his life uh he just built stuff

for himself around our house um anything that worked for him like an indoor golf

driving range electrical

connector yeah it's a little bit better it does rer itself which is

good those shots were straight if they weren't straight the ball wouldn't have gone back straight

that was topped very good and that was bottomed which also

wasn't very good that wasn't very good so I grew up in a world with these

functional things all around the house um doors closed on pulley systems that

were actually car pistons on fishing wire but it was to make sure the door closed to enable drafts not to go

through it and then there' be a block block of wood nailed to the door with a bit of metal and another bit of fishing wire and you could lift that so you

could carry your food through with a train um the the inventions go on forever but I think it's a bit sad I

mean there's something emotional about that and I think it's a bit sad if everything becomes functional because we

are humans or definitely me especially I'm a very emotional person and uh I

think this balance of having some emotion within your design is really

really important so take for this is the office in London um before we uh converted the roof when we first moved

there and um we had a problem with all the uh people parking their cars on this

block of land that I was in front just didn't look great in front of the agency and we wanted to save some place for our

bikes so the easy thing to do the functional thing to do is to just go out there and go no parking you

know and uh it just felt wrong for us we were moving into a new neighborhood in East London so we thought well why don't

we actually try and do some parking Bays that actually sort of make people smile a bit and just you know it it changes it

so you know the Anvil on the car or we'll put pins in your tires or you know uh we'll eat your car which is a random

one but um and I I I think the problem is this

this this battle that's been going on between designers and technologists I sometimes wonder if design is

misunderstood and designers are partly guilty for that and I think we have to really really evaluate what is good

design you know we've got real problems in our agency still like trying to get

the technologists and the designers to agree and actually I think they'd be better off if they were because design isn't about styling design is not style

it's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts good design is a renaal attitude that

combines technology cognitive science human need and Beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it

was missing um and I think the trouble is is we live in a technological Society now

and technology is designing a lot of the stuff at the start and design is not

really being baked in I think you know John Mao who's gone back to Ry interestingly sort of said technology is

outpacing our ability to use it and it's the job of designers to restore balance to this

equation uh I went to the design Museum actually

the other day I was wondering it was about 6 months back and uh DET r always said design should not dominate people

it should help people and it got me thinking that when I went around and I was looking at his stuff I thought about

the the 10 sort of key components to good design and I started going well why

isn't this being applied to all aspects of design whether it's you know digital

product you know I I don't I just wondered what would happen if you started doing it with some of the more

Technologic iCal Brands I think you know di Rams has often said he's you know he's an Apple fan and him and Johnny

Ives are very much there so if you take apple which okay it's been around a bit longer than some of the more recent things but you look at it and you go

they seem to have this balance that everybody talks about oh this aesthetic thing and the use the

function um but then I sort of went back and I went well actually Point s good design is durable maybe there's some

question marks on the iPhone you know because as a human I do

drop things so that was kind of interesting I think also I saw an article on

Greenpeace on the environment and if you go back and you go you know good design

is concerned with environment I think that issue is becoming even more important as we move forwards so whilst

Apple I think is a great example of that I don't think we should all think that we're like you know they've got it

cracked you know Google I think many designers in this room would argue I could have done that tight face better I

don't like it I don't think but I think good design isn't just about look and feel the best design thing they did was

take the page out and clean it out and make it easy for me to know where to go

and then when I did it I wasn't disappointed I got to where I want to Now search is learning from me so it's

actually going to filter some of the bad search out and they're also giving me a lot of components every year they give

me something new to trial that is actually a useful thing so I think you know they do tick quite a few boxes you

know there's a lot of debate about environmentally about whether all these servers are causing more damage than you

know but I think you know quite a good example of um playing to I think they

play with their logos which you know how many how many businesses lost time to the uh the you know the Pac-Man game you

know hours of uh but but you know I think they they play you could say education this was a reonal one which I

think was 150 years of uh x-ray um but that sort of is slightly more makes the

brand slightly more emotional whether or not you choose to like the type face this is a a music site uh Spotify which

uh is uh very successful in the UK and it's I think it's really cleanly laid out but the main thing is it's really

simple to actually use and operate and to share your music so I think you know

good design as opposed to I would say Amazon or Ebay which whilst they're both

successful companies I wonder whether or not if there had been a little bit more

design baked in at the front end they would have ended up being thought of as a little bit more different and a little

bit more functional might have been even more useful uh and I think it's this danger of like not baking design in and

it's not just look and feel I'm talking about here I'm talking about functionality the 10 principles of data

Rams um so I think this is really really important the dumbest mistake is viewing

design as something you do at the end of the process to tidy up the mess as opposed to understanding it's a day one

issue and part of everything now I'm not a designer and uh I'm not a technologist but what I am is

pretty stupid um and I kind of now going to take you through a few examples where

I partly because I'm not that I've tried to blend these two D's and try and do things together at the same time um

walking stupid uh 1D uh and Kim and I uh Kim's my partner

of about 25 years creative partner we were working on a Levis project about

maybe 12 years ago and we got involved with the internet uh and it was this

this sort of it was just this wild west thing and everybody was buying like digital domains to try and make money um

and uh Kim and I were going well we don't want to do that we just want to do something that feels like the web and just anarchic so

um but the trouble was we weren't designers and we didn't know how to design a website anything like that

Richard hooker was he was a young designer in our office so we sat with him uh we found a guy who basically his

life moan life was building Bank websites called John who was down in Chelsea and we actually had just worked

on a run London campaign with a guy called Andy Smith who was an illustrator so we sort of all sat down together and

uh the domain name that Kim and I had sort of wanted to come up to with the there was a guy called Cliff involved as

well we wanted to do something that was subverting domain domain names so uh whoops let get back that so we we

decided to register the denain name www oble like wo W wo w w w oble um and we

thought well that's funny isn't it CU W water had gone and you know other things

but www oble hadn't so um we then thought well how are people going to understand it W oble uh so we thought

right well we have to have a jellies jellies is the big thing you know Jello so so we made the logo of jello and

Richard made a very sort of rounded friendly tight face and uh the idea for us was we were going to take one of

these squares and like do our sort of wobbling thing on it and then we were going to open up all the other squares

and let the public take part doing wobbling things this is like 20 no

1999 I would say 98 99 pre YouTube we messed up big time you know um and uh so

this was the site so Andy Smith did a bit of illustration we used people who had no idea about music to record the

tune which happens now in the office cuz we were just trying to subvert everything we decided that sound was

really really bad on the web so we tried to concentrate on sound a bit this is Andy's drawing he took and uh plane goes

off flies up into a world of uh pink clouds which are actually pink pink jellies and uh he as an interaction

designer he got very excited about this bit he goes oh yeah yeah yeah we'll do this bit because then the jellies move

around and in order to click on them you have to sort of you know follow it with your cursor and stuff and when you do

get one up comes a Jello film and Kim and I spent few years you can't quite see

that it's a it's a jelly jelly Vision it's a jelly in front of famous landmarks is what we decide we do but we

hadn't got money to go to Sydney so we sent a jelly kit to a

mate and and you know you get irritated cuz the the standard of the wobble was

really poor you know to go all the way um trying to get wobbling on an airplane

was pretty interesting beginning our descent into London Heath row expect to have you on the ground British Airways wouldn't let us do this minutes approach

expecting a little bit of turbulence this morning a little bit of low Cloud so I've turned the fast belt seat inside

and uh and even uh a friend of mine Nick Gil went all the way up the Great Wall of China part of the fun was the fact

that you had to take the jelly with you in a plate like and you had to travel quite a long way sometimes but he you

know apping wobble again but I

think and then I tried to play all that back to like the 10 principles of design

and it just about misses every single one um uh nobody went to the site uh no

function but that was part of the reason really OB was about being totally random but what we did do was learn a lot about

sort of the web sound how you do things it was just an interesting uh time and I

think uh we don't make enough mistakes probably uh to the previous speaker I think it feels like we're in a slightly

scientific World sometimes um so this is a project that happened in 2007 really

we were given a chance to pitch uh by Nokia for the Christmas street lights in

uh Regent Street which um is sort of crosses Oxford Street which is the main

lights and then they have these lights down Regent Street and normally they're really really disgusting they're normally sponsored by um any shop that

is on Regent Street can pitch for the business and Nokia were opening their new flagship store so all the shops

pitch and normally it ends up being a I don't know a Disney movie because I think Disney has there and they put all their characters that Christmas in the

lights and you know and then terrible Beast celebrity comes and opens it up you know and turns the lights on and

it's all on London tonight news and uh we thought because it was Nokia we should be using something with

technology and we also thought because their whole thing is about connecting people was there a way with the

technology that the people could turn on the lights um but at that stage you you

know if you try and do too much yourself without the right people I think you you end up being fine so again baking in the

D's so we had like uh a creative team one of who was a pretty strong designer

uh Darren Wright and Lucy ker and then we added to that because we know we were

going to be using a lot of lighting technology we looked at United visual artists who um uh did a lot of

experimental light work um Digital Light work and a guy called Joel GE and Lewis was our main contact there and uh the

project took a year um it went uh all over the place from different shapes to

different materials I think we learned a lot about having to deal with uh so many

partners so we had the you had the local Council you had the local committee for

the streets the Christmas lights thing you had rigging the weight of what you could actually put up there and we were

determined to also try and keep the environment low impact lighting and stuff but this is a little film of where

we ended up in the uh end

Oxo Street have theirs on already but today is the turn of Regent Street for the big Christmas light switch on

is it really change the ones on the street it doesn't does it yeah that's

waiting for the bus and I'm playing with the lights and it's really cool because it's interactive as well it makes the

whole experience more creative very creative Bo is

beautiful I think we bit off more than we can chew there's lots of things that wrong sometimes they didn't interact

right I wanted people to be able to bring to go in and put their own music tune into the lights and like bring

their own music and then turn up at 4:00 and see you know punk rock playing or whatever you wanted playing and uh but

um obviously you're only allowed to have Christmas tunes playing on there so there's a select number you can choose

but um another project that we in 2010 uh identity 1D um and uh this was a

project for Shane Walter who runs uh I think called 1.0 which is in a sort of a

innovative uh show about digital media and arts show uh this was their logo

type face every year he asks normally a creative technology company to uh do his

all his sign his signage and the stuff he needs to do for the event so moving it's normally a 2d 3D moving sometimes

physical thing and uh he asked us if we wanted to be the first advertising agency to do it in order to really to

show our design credentials which we weren't normally allowed to do as much so we took the job on for very little

money um and what we thought was We did an insight and I think 1.0 has a lot of

fans especially when the show is going around so if you it comes to London or then goes to Brazil and it has quite a

lot of conversations going on online and quite a big fan base uh it's been going for about 14 years and uh he um but they

weren't really using that material so what we decided to do was we wondered if we could actually make the logo up by

actually live feeds all going into different points on the type face um which was quite a big sort of digital

build I've been down at uh I've been um chatting to uh uh the team and they came

up they realized that we weren't you know really qualified inside internally so we had David and Tom who actually

both their backgrounds were product designers which came in useful because it was kind of like building I always think it's like building a 3D thing when

you're in the web and uh they teamed up with Kon Schmidt uh from postp

spectacular we also had a girl called Karen Jane who was quite you know a strong more traditional designer in the

sense in the agency and it was really important because we were doing 2D things that the 2D things had a design

ethic to them as well as the actual live project so we built um we built uh

this interactive thing that actually you could take the frames of the posters from it so everything was taken from

what we built

so these are all streams from Twitter uh Facebook and

other and you could spin the whole thing and move around it in order to get to The Stills that you you wanted to so we

would freeze frame a certain section and make our um 2D executions

from

that then these were the ey dents that then

no

I

it's great you could write different messages I was writing rude ones all about my boss whilst we were

testing so for the year that was a sort of Open Source code and each time it went into a different uh location

obviously there' be different streams going in but also people could recode it and do what they want with it so uh

that's just come to an end because the new one's coming out for 2011 which just started um I think we must have got

closer than I think we did on the other projects to baking the design and the technology together because we managed

to uh get actually uh into the best designs of the year in the design Museum

and uh not the digital design Museum that doesn't actually exist um uh game board is uh a single D

again and this was uh has just finished in London in I think it was in February

we did a beta test uh to try and capture youth running uh it's quite a hard thing

to get sort of the the feeling was used heavily into gaming uh not really sort

of traditional running so the idea was to do turn um London into a game board

and in February we did a 24 4 Hour uh very small beta test um we learned a lot

of things from that like people didn't really like running at night uh on their own um so I think you know we got a lot

of things wrong but just recently they just did the second phase which is two weeks it's called Nike grid uh and

basically uh in order to do it because it's a game thing you need to have gaming designers we had a guy called Dan

hon who actually is inside of WID and Kennedy I think as we progress through these you'll see that more different

kind of people are coming in to a and Kenny we had a traditional creative team we had designers as well guy

Featherstone Ben terret sh Murphy so because the design of something you know the look and feel is

important to Nike as much as the functionality because it says something about their brand uh we also Dan

suggested that we worked with data visualization famous for their mapping Stam out of uh uh us um which was a

really big coup because they don't normally do uh advertising projects and then obviously our third partner was

akqa in London as well who do a lot of building at the back end but I would say that it's really important that all

three of those people are involved early on and are actually any ideas can come from anywhere and it's really important

that you're baking it all together uh so this is how you split London into 48

different postcodes and within each postcode uh what they did was actually instead of uh doing it with mobile devic

which would have been easy but also makes it slightly uh that it could be anywhere they chose uh phone boxes

within London uh four phone boxes in each uh area and then you had to run

between them um so you'd go online and you'd uh you'd find your uh post code up

the top it's a bit like four squaring that you get badges so you find your post code click on that and then it will

go in and you'll find where your where your different phone boxes are after a

while so you can locate the phone boxes in your area that you need to run

to and when you run you put in a code and then there's prizes for the

fastest uh the most amount of running there was different categories and then

you get Badges and within the 2 we period as well because it's a game they ran a lot of glitch games within it and

obviously uh we tried to incre encourage as well gaming uh together so you had to

um in order to get on this uh you had to sign up on Facebook which was a really

good idea it was the only way you could do it because Facebook immediately are in communities it's also pushing out to

all your friends you could have teams up to 16 uh they targeted universities

heavily and then east west north south London so there was lots of different games going on between different people

really and different organizations I think the reason they chose the post box uh sorry the telephone boxes was to make

it feel a part of a London thing and what was really interesting was obviously a lot of the phone boxes went wrong or didn't work but the community

fed that back to the grid and then the grid dealt with it and got on with it and it felt very much as though the

community was running this unlike run London which was originally getting 10,000 people to do a 10K where you turn

up on a day and do it this was very much people you're giving them a platform and they're deciding how they'll do it to

some extent so uh that was really good and some of the Facebook Community this is deep deep engagement you know okay I

think there was about 3,000 people who sign signed up for it but 800 people are doing really deep engagement much deeper

than you know the the learning curve is than we thought and that's why I think they've done a beta test we've done this

and then it's where can you take this platform uh so it's been a really good thing they even organized

uh their own party at the end of the two weeks uh uh and and you know they're feeding into what they want the grid to

be next time so uh these are the glitch games so throughout the two weeks you

got glitch games like you could suddenly have right boys versus girls on one day and you'd like that or you could have

universities which universities and because it was all data capture every day you'd get data capture against these

you know one was uh on Halloween if you ran on Halloween late at night you got double points or you know and who won

that or there was a tube strike so immediately they could alter it and go right tube strike who's running who's not so there was all these glitch games

where you got more points and then all of that data would regularly be uploading on the site so you'd have

stuff like this going

on so these are all the runs that are taking place during the the

day um so it was like it's pretty pretty pretty interesting project to work on um

and again it's not it's not just product design it's you know so many elements of design I think um and uh what was

interesting the end facts that came out were uh in the 14 days uh the runners

who took par ran three times the length of the Nile once around Mars and if your

same bolt was running at 100 meter Pace it would he uh his record Pace he would have had to run for 22 and a half days

so it's pretty pretty interesting inter in the top Runners covered like uh uh we're doing 600 runs which you know is

pretty Bonkers um uh good I think uh one

of Dan weyden's sort of beliefs in the company he's a bit of a hippie anyway is that we should really be doing good I

mean it's it's sort of he he genuinely believes that companies should do

good and I think it's very easy for advertising agencies and companies to go oh well I'm doing my little Charity bit

I'm I've got the little Charity one here or that and uh Sophie um uh dollar who's

actually a sort of strategic person so to speak although I I don't actually like putting people in boxes because

she's very creative came to us and said I don't think widen and Kennedy's doing enough we've grown to 200 people we

should be doing a lot more and uh she came to us with a very very simple idea she found out I think it was something

like in the UK she got very I think every day we waste 7 million pounds or something on energy wasted leaving

lights on leaving kettles on leaving computers on and she said as a company I

think one of the problems is people don't identify with that wastage like they do when they're paying the bills at

home so how can we actually get the company to start feeling about things and actually doing some good so she came

up with a really simple concept which is uh called off on and all it is is she uh

got the the building assessed over the last 5 years and worked out how much money we were we were wasting uh every

every year and she said what would happen if we could try and save that money but instead of just us saving it

and putting it in our pocket it actually went to doing some good in third world communities so it's a really simple idea

we switch off and you switch on in the communities um because of solar solar

with solar power so she found a solar power company because we obviously had to partner up with somebody um and uh

this is the first home that we're going to discool it's Cheryl's children's home we're going to try and light up if we

just save 10% of the wastage uh I believe they can light up four

classrooms and uh and the main room for a year it seems like it seems such a

simple idea you can't do it but what we decided was we were going to do it all ourselves so uh we've got the creative

technologist in housee now we could have gone and got a bit of coding but we decided to do our own coding um with had

internal designers on it from well creative technologist Jo Wilbert Paul Skinner Daniel hman who was freelancing

at the time uh and then we had uh designers uh obviously because the look

and feel is still important and the functionality is massively important of this thing how could you make it so simple so solar Aid came in and this is

what this is Sophie talking about what she's been doing

as a business we're guilty of wasting on a daily basis in terms of gas and electricity be from leaving lights on

from leaving computers plugged in all night from boiling a kettle full when you only need one cup but actually this

isn't a problem just at widens this is a problem throughout the

UK the concept is very simple we encourage people to turn off as much as

possible when not in use so lights kettles poer slots computers etc and invest every penny saved in lighting up

a developing World Community with solar

power CH children's uh home is a school in an orphanage which was built on

donated land on the outskirts of Nairobi part of the problems that they have as an orphanage is that they're wasting a

lot of money through having to pay for kerosene to light the classrooms after

dark 1.5 million women and children across the continent die every year just

from inhaling um kerosin fumes what we're hoping to do through this project

is to use the savings that are generated through the actions of WK staff to

afford a system which can then be put on the roof of uh this orphanage and to

help them light up the the cumes you're taking that that that that

positive uh change in people's behavior and you're actually using that to create even more positive change by uh giving

that money to somebody who really could do something useful with it in a place where they don't have power Etc that is

an amazing sort of chain of events that the environmentalists will be really excited about the sort of charitable

donor will be very excited about we're very excited about I mean it's it's it's lovely

when you work in a company uh it's sometimes particularly when we get to be like nearly 200 people now you don't

think about stuff as being yours you think about it as it's somehow the companies and so what I think this will

do is remind people that um all of us are responsible for the stuff that we

use and ofone is very much about um the marriage of creativity and Technology

it's not purely about data a lot of lot of energy monitors is solely about showing you how many wats you're using

in real time um and then Translating that into money um if you're not paying the bills that might not feel so

relevant creating these little um immediate response displays around the building so as you use anything inside

of that kitchen space you'll watch the numbers jump up you'll watch them drop down as soon as they get turned off it's

the perfect way to make a connection between your gesture and its effect on a

building I'm simply a big believer that people staying engaged visually a lot longer than they stay engaged in terms

of just numbers and ideas the screen savers will show exactly how we're doing

at that moment so it will react to the building's realtime energy consumption and show whether we're lighting up a lot

or a little of Cheryl's children's home you want to have it so that people are getting this information or this

visualization or what have you through avenues that they normally would have taken anyway

we're really into the idea of opening up our our concept and our code for other

people to contribute the technology is not is not

terribly Advanced and I actually count that as a a positive side of this project so it didn't require that WK go

out and purchase state-of-the-art equipment that very few can afford so we managed to affect one orphanage in

Nairobi fantastic but then when the next building starts up the same project we take this project and we do it around

the entire white and Community Network then all of a sudden we're affecting 5 six seven 10 different School spaces

around the world what an incredible opportunity that is and hopefully in years to come this will be the norm this

will be like the very basic approach to corporate social responsibility to help

lower everybody's carbon emissions but also um helping to fight poverty as

well and it's that's been going when went live about two weeks ago and

already there's been like a really interesting we've had newspapers contact us who want to put it right throughout

their organization and look at it and monitor it for a year I

think I think it's really interesting the the problem because you know there's been a lot of energy monitors you know

like there's the Watsons and stuff like that which are very useful at your home and stuff but it was a slightly different you know it's again it's

taking a slightly different look at the same thing within companies and hopefully we can start I I can see it as

a massive gain I can see different companies around the world challenging each other like a sort of you know like

people betting on football or stuff and challenging so I hope it really takes off but um you know it takes a lot of

determination I can't thank Sophie dollar enough you need someone in your organization who has ideas who are going to push it through and pull everybody in

and bake it all at the start the last project um will probably appeal to some of uh the designers this is slightly

more personal project I always try to have one personal project going on which I normally never ever get done um but uh

I kind of think in this world of technology the pace at which we're traveling um sometimes we lose a bit of

time for craft and uh I was never I'm a perfectionist so although I couldn't I

can't necessarily do craft I love seeing people spending time doing stuff and craft so um this project was um really

to try and celebrate the craft of the uh printing press and the people who still

use it um because it was the thing that sort of innovated many years ago now we have the computer but I wonder if

there's some kind of difference I used to watch people with this you know the right weight of ink and the and the and

and the pressing it was just you know it was just a beautiful craft and uh there was a time when it was looking like it

was going to die out and uh there was a lot of type shops closing in London and all around the world and uh now there

seems to be a little bit of you know backlash against that but um this Project's called almost

extinct and uh the idea is to celebrate these people and the things they do but also to at the same time to do some good

for animals so um bit out of focus sorry on this one but uh the idea is that uh I'm

setting up this goes live literally next week hopefully

um I'm basically making people design animals but they are not allowed to use

computers so you have to Source exactly the right piece of existing wood or

metal type uh to try and make the animals I think I've got some design

ethic in it I've seen animals design before with type but there's a real Simplicity to it but the idea is this

sourcing you have to find exactly the right piece of typography um and uh so in order to do

this the project Kim and I we drew a lot of the designs we're not designers so we need designers so this project will go

um initially to a beta test of designers that we've Chosen and then as we get more animals we'll blow it out bigger

and open it out um and I'd like to mention Ellie who's my sort of producer

who built all of the the back end uh on the blog because I don't necessarily have time feeble excuse but this is one

so the project started when we start scribbling animals so this is uh 2DS

which is probably uh you know uh in in the better sense of 2DS um this is my

for duck really simple d uh and I knew that if I gave this to some designer

they would craft it and make it brilliant if they had to choose it the first designer I ever worked with typographer was a guy called Dave

Wakefield many many years ago back in 1985 he's been collecting wood type for

since 1970 wooden metal type he has two whole double garages at home uh he's a

lovely lovely man and he this is David he went into his uh he he looked at all

our alphabet he said I want to do D is for duck and I want to do Z is for zebra

and I said okay and the reason he did that was cuz he knew I think in his head he had these letters in his garage so he

goes away for the experts that's what they are English Latin face from around

1800 C30 line and ano has grotesque English cutting of helvetica made in the

late 60s 16 line so he overprinted these and he came up he turned my D into duck into that

which although slightly out focus here I promise you is a beautiful thing I love the way that he chws something with the

serfs to make the tail of the duck and actually then overprinting so it becomes the eye but the weight of the

overprinting is really important uh and again we haven't blown anything up here

this is done the craft you have to do it on the Press obviously you have to do two runs but you know that's point of

the thing so when you look at this is my drawing of zedi for zebra it's really really hard to draw a zebra using Zed I

thought we'd do a closeup you know and David goes away comes back and

I thought it was really really beautiful the way he the the lines in the bit of type almost look like the skin on the

zebra where you see some of those zebras where their skins cracked and stuff but I just really really really like this so

I thought well you know we'd extend this out David turned ears for elephant

down he said I haven't got the right piece of type you need to have a really

big piece of wood type for that because the Grain in it the more grain in it the more it'll look like an elephant so this

is why the project is now going to go online we're going to we've got type houses interested we've got lots of type

from all around the world typographers and designers and they're going to start looking they are open to have their own

ideas with animals my only request is that they are really really simple and smart I see overdesigned things like you

know uh Antelope made out of all the letters Antelope it's it's not clean enough and tight enough for me I think

it's really simple but once you get a Big E then you've got to find the right size e for the head and should the trunk

have a little bit of that in it so it looks like so you know every time now I walk through the market there's these

old wood bits of type and I'm sort of looking just to see uh here are other animals that didn't do this uh I think

that's a really good one if we get it right that's G's for gorilla um I just think that g is just made to look like a

gorilla I don't know what it is I'm not a designer you guys are probably going oh it's that one you know um iguan

really hard to draw so maybe we just use the same eyes for the feet going up you know footsteps I think you know we don't

know what this Project's going to end up as whether it's a book a show I love the idea of doing a show with the actual

pieces of wood type beneath and stuff but I think it's I want it to morph into lots of different things because they're

quite iconic uh Ellis for Lama um if we find the right L I think we might get

away with it um in England used to have terrible problems with moles so these are just M's piled up like moles I think

and then if you want to see the mole you can but um I'm not sure I need it could have moose if you want if we get that

right all of these are rubbish these are just my little scribbles you guys can make these brilliant but um that's

that's part of the project I think if we only had one white out of black it'd probably be owl and I think where we

place it on the page is really important um uh pelican maybe if we found peas

with small holes I don't know but as I say uh the designers who are going to

take part initially are allowed to put in their own suggestions and stuff but I'm just trying to keep it simple you know if we do do porcupine the P's all

have to be the same PE I think because otherwise it gets too fussy so it's it's just sort of design elements and that's

that's just a project I'm doing and what's interesting is you know if you go back I'm using digital technology to

make this project happen I'm using I didn't go and design the whole WordPress site I could have had it all set in

beautiful wooden typography the whole thing yeah probably would have looked amazing but did I need to do that I

wanted a functional site that people were sort of used to I cleaned it out as much as I can you know you got the alphabet you just click on that you get

your thing you post it up and we'll find out if it's simple enough but I you know that's still using what I call digital

technology as a part of a design process to get something and then you're not allowed to for the main bit of the

project um I'm just about out of time and the only sort of in summing up I think what I'd

ask people to do I think if you look at the future you can see that technology is going to come faster and faster down

the line at us we've got nearfield Communications we've got augmented reality we've got GPS you know

everybody's seen the videos online of you sort walking around like you know with all this stuff coming at us you know and moving and I go if you are

designing for me for if you're designing for humans please please please put the

10 principles of design and bake it in because good design should make our

lives simpler it shouldn't make it more complicated I mean you know we're still

looking at mobile phones like this that has to change we will we will get where it

becomes more intuitive and starts becoming invisible but I think you have to bake all of the design elements in at

the start rather than doing it at the end and then hopefully

we won't be talking about two DS we'll be talking about one thank you very much