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we’re are thrilled to announce that our record sleeve for polinski’s debut album labyrinths has won a color in design award. this is the first time we’ve ever won an award for any print work we’ve produced. quite a thing.

winners will apparently be featured in HOW magazine (july issue), and PRINT magazine (august issue) as well as their websites, the pantone website, and celebrated in a newly created online color in design collection, appearing in later summer.

a huge thank you once again to kim at monotreme records for producing the project, to branislav cirkovic for his fantastic typography, and of course to our long-time friend and collaborator paul wolinski for making the incredible music that inspired it all. to commemorate the occasion – below is a previously unreleased digital copy of the poster we produced for the cd + vinyl versions of the release.

in other polinski news, we’re hard at work on visuals for the forthcoming future everything show in manchester england next month. stay tuned.

my latest IFP article is a call to arms to designers and those employing them, to raise the standard in terms of what is aesthetically acceptable. it’s very easy to dismiss the need for a good looking visual design, when money is short and the immediate gains are negligible. the article strives to point out however that the long-term affects of these decisions can be quite damaging, both psychologically and sociologically. here’s an excerpt from the piece -

“to reiterate once and for all, it’s our responsibility as human beings to remember there’s a lot of people on the planet who have no control over the look of the world around them and who are ruled by those who want to ‘make a buck’. those of us that must suffer living beneath billboards towering above, promising soulless dreams, the garishly coloured junk food wrappers sitting in the gutter, the television commercials selling drugs for pains that don’t exist, the dying buildings built with cheap materials slumping under the weight of their own short lives, the angry faces and the lack of respect for anything. these people aren’t idiots. they know better than anyone that the look of the world around them massively affects their subconscious state of mind. they know it when they walk out of their rotting front door, glance at the grey sky, the paint peeling from the walls of their neighbour’s house across the street, scrape the ice from their car’s windshield with the splintering lid of a margarine tub, curse as the car won’t start and their foot goes through the rusted bottom of it as they lash out in anger. they know it when some of them later get drunk and walk around smashing windows, keying car doors, spray-painting church walls, and beating people up – all scenes I’ve witnessed in my years growing up in england in the suburbs of cambridge, 3 years at university in manchester and later living in bedford-stuyvesant in new york city. It’s a level of rage that I can support and forgive when places like that are your reality. try getting mugged at 8:30am on your way to work, as i was in 2008, and being told by the cops that there’s no point in reporting it.

some of these people hate the world around them. they know what the end-game is better than the thoughtless assholes who make the products, create the ads for them and leave those ads gathering mould on some rusted old bus-stop sign, 23 stops out of town in some relentless nightmare of a burnt out suburb. the sorts of places that otherwise only filmmakers dare frequent in order to make their gritty melodramas. we have got to remember that every small gesture toward making things simply functional, that disregards how much ‘greyer’ you are making the user’s day, is a very valid negative point.”

you can read the rest of the article here.

here’s the first in a series of blog posts grouping together some work which is pretty new to us – that of film poster design. it’s taken us a long time to get to the point where we trust ourselves (let alone others trusting us) to venture into this world, but so far things are going okay.

needless to say but there are more in the works, for some pretty cool projects too. stay tuned.

in july of 2011 i was staying in los angeles with some friends, needing some time out from everything. the one thing i had on my plate during my stay out there in the breezy dry heat, was a pitch document for a job we’d been put forward for by some collaborators of ours.

the job was to revamp the carbon war room website. the carbon war room is a non-profit organization set up by richard branson for the facilitation and realization of investment in sustainable low-emissions industries and technologies. in other words, an enterprise setup to help investors and entrepreneurs realize the financial benefits of ‘going green’ on a vast scale in today’s market.

version industries’ MO from the outset has been to fight to work for clients that we believe have something worthwhile to say or offer the world. this job was consequently very attractive to us as we knew we’d be able to put a good deal of work into helping, even in some immeasurably small capacity, to change the state of the world today.

the trick of course was that we were pitching against 6 other companies for the job, a good deal of whom already worked in the environmental sector or were already working for the carbon war room in some capacity. furthermore we’d never done a website of this kind before. this is something that always lets us down initially with new clients, as if we actually have never done any website before. by which we mean that we try with every job to do something entirely different every time. so the odds were against us, plus i was sort of on holiday and back in the new york studio everyone had 100 other pressing issues to attend to.

i talked it through with giles over the phone and we came up with a plan. he produced the words to describe our approach to this, and i sat down and started drawing some pictures, so to speak. the understanding we had of how best to handle this project (and as it turned out, this would be our advantage over everyone else competing) was that we needed to make this site engaging (they were getting horrid bounce-rates), less business-like (the current site felt like it was for some london law-firm, with ‘small print’ everywhere) and more enjoyable on the various new computing platforms out there (i.e. let’s make it big, fun, easy to scroll and hit buttons with your fingers on an ipad). for a company trying to offer a fresh approach to tackling the world’s major environmental concerns, their problems seemed clear to us in terms of design.

the key element we were shooting for in our pitch was something that later became known as the engagement component. this was very simple a colorful, quick, javascript driven tool that determined what type of person you the user were. it would then direct you to the part of the site that was relevant to you, explaining what the site had to offer to you, in your own terms.

the other elements we were suggesting in our pitch were conveyed by a series of quick mock-ups of our vision for the site using large format photography, a very spacious design and bold use of typography.

we packaged the whole thing up and sent it off. i went back into the sun with a sense that overall we possibly could have done better, but not sure how. it was just that feeling you have when you’re in someone else’s house in another part of the world, and you don’t quite have the same focus as you do when you’re in your own studio.

a week or so later were informed we were in the next round and that we’d caught their attention. a few weeks later, after some further interviews we were told we’d been selected to do the job. it was the first of a few radical changes for our company around this time, and was deeply affecting our general outlook. after almost 10 years of being around we were now getting the work we felt we were always made for. this meant of course that in return we had to thank them for doing so. we had to thank them in the only way we knew how – by doing the best job we could.

it was a vast task, encompassing initially a large main website completely integrated with their already blooming business forums on linkedin, and a smaller subsidiary site for one of the their latest active operations, renewable jet fuels. there were many meetings with a great deal of back and forth over the various approaches we should take. a lot of new ideas were developed in this time that went beyond our initial pitch. the filter we provided, as they were so fond of saying in meetings, was to give their content a rock ‘n’ roll feel. not to be taken literally of course, but it simply meant we needed to make this attractive to people like us as well as people like them. this included providing infographics throughout the site with a certain wide-eyed, humorous and naïve aesthetic -

and making the home page of renewablejetfuels.org look a little like the interior of an airplane -

one of the final elements to fall into place was their ubiquitous sonar. they wanted us to translate their company logo and how it represented a map of the carbon war room’s various facilities into an interactive site navigation tool. this is the kind of thing we rarely get to do, and is always a pleasure. it involved sitting around, arguing the difference between ‘what would be cool’ and ‘what would annoy the hell out of people’ and finding some middle ground therein. you can see the results of this if you click on the company logo when you first hit the site.

it’s not often you get paid to make a difference. often you just have to do that kind of thing for free. embrace it when you get the chance. we’d like to extend a huge amount of thanks to mark grundy, david schwartz, peter boyd and the rest of the carbon war room team who made this project such a great pleasure to work on. there is of course more work yet to do, but right now seemed like an appropriate time to raise a glass to the experience.

cheers,

i’ve just handed in my latest article for the IFP. in essence it’s a piece that questions how easy it is to assess the quality of a film (or any work of art) in an age where hype is everything. the article starts out with a proposed set of rules and then attempts to qualify them. these rules are as follows -

rule 1. (to kill expectation)

go into the film without having read or watched anything. trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

rule 2. (to kill projection)

assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. do not project your own expectations. let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

rule 3. (to kill hype)

don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. that’s what it’s there for.

you can read the rest of the article here.

we’d like to thank gus mantel for allowing us to use his incredible animated gifs to illustrate the piece. you can view more of his work here.