howies invited us to the opening launch of their shop on Carnaby Street, London, yesterday. We’d seen pictures of the shop, but it’s even better in the flesh. Even though it’s small, the shop if perfectly formed with loads of nice details, including hand-drawn illustrations on the walls, a sink so customers can re-fill their water bottles, bookshelves crammed with interesting books, and an amazing wooden table upstairs that has the girl’s jeans laid on. The shop really captures what howies is about, something that can’t have been easy to convey with it being in central London. For a first attempt at a shop, the howies team have done brilliantly.

All the guests that attended were given a tree sappling as a present. As it’s coming up to the end of Thoughtful’s first year, we had the idea of planting the trees, and taking pictures of them every year. The pictures would make nice page dividers if we ever do a 20 year book of Thoughtful’s work.

While we were on the very boring trip down to London, we played a ’designers edition’ of eye spy inpired by a post on Russell Davies’ blog. The game was to spot vans and lorries with the most useless company straplines.

Here’s our top three.

Our movie clips are back up now, hurrah! Apparently Dan Germain is a popular guy, all the views his movie generated had locked out our server as the bandwidth wasn’t large enough, our webhost told us.

If you tried to view it and couldn’t, sorry, it should be fine now.

One at a time please!

Morning, we’d like to offer our apologies to any Thoughtful blog readers out there who have tried to watch one of our movie clips over the weekend, and was denied access to them.

We think the problem is down to our webhost blocking them for taking up too much bandwidth (we’ve been told before). We’ll try and fix the problem as soon as possible.

Here’s the talk Dan from innocent did on Wednesday.

If you’re confused about the Borat comment at the start, there was a guy sat on the table in front of Dan who was a Borat impersonator. Dan got a bit worried that he’d rush the stage.

If you’re having a lazy Friday afternoon, this is well worth watching. Click here.

There are 10 days left for you to get your entries in to our student Tombola competition. First prize is this year’s D&AD Annual, with two runners up prizes of a Student D&AD Membership each for one year, and a third runner up prize will be a pair of D&AD lecture tickets.

We’ve had lots of great entries in so far, but there’s still time for more. You’re allowed to enter as many entries as you want, and as the winners will be pulled out of a tombola, the more you enter, the more chance you have of winning a prize.

All the competition details are here.

Good luck!

This morning we attended the second day of the Business Northwest event to see Doug Richard give a talk about his career. You may remember Doug for his stint on BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den. He told us he had two Dragon’s Den records. One for the least number of investments made, and one for the most offers rejected by the entrepreneurs.

Doug was nothing like how you see him on TV, he came across a lot less serious about business, he was funny, and most significantly and surprisingly, put most of his success down to luck. That’s why we’re blogging this actually. For those out there who are starting their own studios, or will do in the future, it’s useful to know that luck may play a huge part in your success.

One of Doug’s stories of his early days in the software business (pre internet), involved a man called John. John was from IBM, and had been given an assignment. He was given a year and a bucket load of cash to find someone who develop the technology to digitally morph a picture of a large person, into a picture of a thin person. This was needed for a client of IBM who was in the health and fitness business. They wanted to install the software in their gyms. Back then, this software didn’t exist.

So by chance John walks into Doug’s office one day, tells him what he needs and ‘does he know anyone?’. Doug said ’We can do it, but it’ll cost you $10,000 for me just to think about the problem’. So basically John pulls out a cheque and Doug was left with a dilemma. He didn’t have the first clue how to come up with the software. One night shortly after, Doug’s wife was flicking through the TV channels and by chance an ad came on for a company who could digitally place a new hairstyle on a picture of your head, so you could see how you’d look before you went to the hairdressers. Doug contacted them and asked could they ‘do bodies’ too. They said yes, so Doug bought their software and tells John to get his butt over there. He then supplies it to IBM for a very tidy profit indeed.

Thoughtful are only 9 months old, yet we’ve been in situations in which if certains events had not happened, we wouldn’t be here today. Lady Luck has definitely smiled down on us a few times this year. We’ll save our story for another day.

“...and in ‘94 I was THIS rich...”

This morning Thoughtful attended a breakfast meeting with Dan Germain of innocent, organised by Business Northwest.

We've never met Dan before, and two things struck us:

1. He's tall.

2. What you drink is what you get.

We’re not writing this because Dan might read this and think we’re nice guys. It’s because innocent and their communications are often discussed in our studio.

We really like innocent, but at times we can take a cynical view of their irreverent image, and question if their style of communication feels genuine - especially when you have 100,000 people attending your ‘village fete’.

It would be a fair question to ask if it was all invented, or fake.

But after meeting Dan, listening to him talk, we have to say: it’s all true.

The tone of voice, the village fete and the grass covered vans are not some brand consultancy’s creation, it's a genuine reflection of who they are as people. In a similar way that Rutger Hauer was the embodiment of a pint of Guinness in the 80’s Pure Genius campaign, Dan Germain is an innocent smoothie, with a full beard. And, that's why it works (for them).

Nothing’s changed, from selling smoothies to 100 people in North London, to selling smoothies to 100,000 people at a village fete in Regents Park.

Before Dan took to the stage, he came over to introduce himself and chat. He was witty and charismatic. And, after his talk he gave each and every one who wanted to speak to him his full attention (and believe us, there were lots). He never looked bored or in a hurry to be somewhere else. You really got the feeling he loves what he's a part of. And, when everyone had gone, he came over to shake our hands and say goodbye.

On days like today, you can believe in ‘magic’.

We’re guessing all this comes down to something David Hieatt, co-founder of howies has discussed in his presentations, which is honesty.

When howies feel they've not delivered as a company, they hold their hands up. Then set about putting things right. David believes his customers appreciate this level of honesty, and will have a lot more time for a company trying to do things in a different way.

We’ll be posting up Dan’s presentation later this week.

And if ever you’re giving your details to Business Northwest, make sure you tell them twice, so not to end up with a really silly business title...

Yesterday we told you about Ken Garland’s manifestos talk to the first year LCC students.

We managed to film part of it, which you can see here.

Last Friday, Thoughtful were invited to join a presentation on manifestos given by Ken Garland, to a group of first year students at the LCC.

Despite a few stutterings and James’ sausage fingers, we managed to get through it. Ken Garland on the other hand was flawless.

He did most of his presentation, not from the stage but from the centre isle of the lecture theatre. He was able to move up and down the room speaking to about 200 students, in what felt a very intimate presentation. By far the biggest highlight of Ken's presentation was when he spoke about the Ply-Tech Junior Chair which he designed for Galt Toys.

The idea is brilliantly simple. The chair would be sold to schools and local parish halls where space is a premium. Each day the teacher would come in and ask the children to build their own chairs, and then take them apart at the end of the day...just imagine the scene.

Watching Ken Garland taught us a few lessons in the art of public speaking, and it was an experience we'll always remember. When it came time for Thoughtful to present, Ken Garland sat in the very chair he made an hour earlier.

We don't feel particularly well qualified to talk about Ken Garland, or his work but this would be an opportunity wasted if we didn't make any students (or designers) reading this post aware of his career and his work.

It's fair to say Ken Garland is a legend of design, he is one of the great British designers with a career spanning 5 decades.

He studied art and design in the early 50's at Central School of Art and Crafts where he was in a group of students who would go on to become the second generation of British graphic design. His peers included Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Ivor Kamlish among others. Ken was appointed as the art editor of the Design Council’s Design magazine from 1956-62, after which he set up his own company, Ken Garland & Associates, which he continues to run.

Ken Garland has produced many striking pieces of work for political and social causes, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As well as designing the corporate identity (and many games) for Galt Toys.

He is best known for writing the historic First Things First manifesto, which he read out at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on an evening in December 1963. A manifesto which met with a prolonged applause and the signature of 21 other visual communicators.

The First Things manifesto called for a ‘reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication’.

Some of you may have noticed the signatories are in reverse order, alphabetically. Ken told us, this is because he wanted Edward Wright, who was a well-established and respected figure at the Central School to lead the list.

In 1999 the manifesto was redrafted, after Canadian magazine Adbusters had come across First Things First in a back issue of Eye ('There is such a thing as society' by Andrew Howard, no. 13 vol. 4). They felt its sentiments had become 'more, rather than less relevant'. And, jointly published (with 33 signatories) the ‘First Things First Manifesto 2000’, with Emigré, the AIGA Journal, Eye, Blueprint, Items and Form.

To mark the talk, we designed (or un-designed) a poster which Ken Garland individually signed. We think it's a pretty neat idea: a signed manifesto poster.

And, being a young practice keen to show the creative community what we can do, we thought the 'signed manifesto poster' would make an interesting competition entry. But quite quickly after all the 'high-fives', we stopped and took a long hard look at what we were doing. Isn't entering THIS poster at odds with the whole idea of design competitions - given that the speaker wrote the historic First Things First manifesto?

Shouldn't we be using our skills and talents for pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills? Hmmm.

Of course, the answer is 'yes', but on the whole we share design critic and author Steven Heller's view that 'graphic designers can make a big noise, but they have limited power'. That is by no way an excuse for us to avoid self-critique, we just feel it takes co-operation from all sides, Designer / Client / Government for us to produce more worthwhile forms of communication. It also a question of us balancing our commercial work with work that falls into the charity, ethical and cultural sectors, something which isn't so easy to do.

So, would we sign the First Things First manifesto? No. (Well, not just yet.) Not that we don't agree with its message - but it’s easy to sign a document. We think we need to prove ourselves first.

It would appear Ken Garland's First Things First manifesto is doing its job again by igniting a debate (in our studio, at least).

We're very keen to hear your thoughts on the First Things First manifesto and First Things First Manifesto 2000. So whether you're a student seeing this for the first time. Or a designer who thinks nothing has changed for fourty-four years, please leave a comment.

Thoughtful would like to thank:

Anna Gerber for inviting us to talk. Anna is currently developing a new book entitled Another Green World: Graphic Design and Green Issues, to be published by Laurence King in 2009.

Ken Garland for making us think a bit harder our work (and props are always good to have in presentation).

The first year students who attended, especially the five students who stood up and asked some really interesting, and probing questions (please get in-touch).

One last point, for any students attending any future talks or seminars with a speaker like Ken: Walking in late without offering any kind of apology isn’t very thoughtful.

We’ve finally converted the film to a web friendly format. We had to split it into sections as it was just taking too long. Because of this, there may be the odd word missing. Hope you don’t mind.

Two bits of the talk that stuck out for us, was Peter describing how he first met Tony Wilson (Tony had a toy elephant’s head on his shoulder, see Part 5), and the fact the talk was held in Second Life as well as real life. Virtual people were able to ask Ben and Peter questions, which we thought was brilliant.

You can listen to the talk here:

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Thanks to Pollyanna for letting us film the event.

There was a great talk by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly last night at Urbis, Manchester. Thoughtful took a video camera along, so we’ll try and get something online later.

Last week John Grant kindly offered a copy of his new book to the first 50 bloggers that linked to his blog.

We’ve already got a copy of the book, but we’ll post a link to it anyway as we’d highly recommend it.

Back in July, howies launched a T-shirt design competition in preparation for the opening of their new T-shirt print shop. The winning design would end up on a howies T, and be sold on their site. Thoughtful love a good competition, and we’ve never done T-shirts before, so we spent a sunny afternoon thinking of a few.

We had loads of ideas for the T, and we couldn’t decide on a final one to enter, so we put them all in.

Unfortunately, ours didn’t make the grade but you can see our rough ideas here modelled by Doh Boy.

Well done to the winner, Clive, you can buy his nice design here.

Our friend Mike Rigby just emailed us with a link to a nifty little website. Live Surface provides the designer with a ton of blank surfaces on which to place artwork. As Mike says ‘This can at least save on materials during the mock up / visualization stage’. We’re all for that. We think it’ll save a lot of time too, especially when those deadlines start looming.

Thanks Mike.

A thought which made us wonder: Should the Design Week awards
lightbulb be changed to a more energy efficient one?