The list of available fonts on iOS mentioned at the end may be out of date, but you’ll get the message. Since I wrote this, the new iPad has appeared, featuring the amazing Retina high-resolution screen. Its sharpness suddenly shows up the flaws in typefaces. To me – an old person – this reminds me of the discussion we had when photosetting took over hot metal type in the 70s. And everybody makes the same assumptions again. Mostly the wrong ones, looking for a solution in technology instead of design.


“A typographer who hasn’t found the appropriate typeface may not have decreased the informational value of a text, but gave up the opportunity to considerably increase its effectiveness.”

Thus wrote G.W. Ovink, Dutch typographer and historian, way back before he knew any other media besides paper.

Every medium has always had constraints for the type that goes with it. Whether you design a newspaper, a poster, a stamp or a website: you have to consider the technical environment, the reader, the client, the content. As the surfaces of substrates used for printing got smoother, the resolution of type went up along with it. If you look at a Gutenberg Bible through a magnifying glass, you’d never believe the craters, bumps and blotches that look like gorgeous letters from a safe reading distance. Bright and shiny, smoothly coated paper for high-quality offset printing requires the letters to be sharp and well-defined, even though the human eye doesn’t like too much contrast. Technology, being what it is – a means to promote itself if not mankind – kept providing more resolution and thus invisible detail than we ever needed. Once printing could hardly be more refined, along came the Cathode Ray Tube, and all the high definition that the suppliers of typesetting and printing equipment had declared not only inevitable but vital, was broken down into crude bits of colour, red, green and blue only. Type suddenly looked like Lego bricks when compared to the refinement a printer like Bodoni had been capable of at the beginning of the 19th century, long before photosetting and offset printing, let alone coated stock.

The web has always just been bad paper. Now it’s starting to look like good paper and designers will have to treat it as such. But as always at the beginning of a new paradigm, we have to imitate the old one while we get used to the new possibilities that people over a certain age always consider a challenge. Apart from what technology will allow us to do, there are physical laws — our eyes, our brain, light, contrast; we cannot ignore those if we want to communicate. Cultural parameters like reading habits, literary culture (or lack of) – our deeply embedded fear of change, all these give an excuse to imitate the old, even though there are no technical reasons to do so. But we read best what we read most.

Every new medium raises the same questions. Things which were thought mature in one media will take a while to mature in a new one. Look at the new electronic books, particularly those on Apple’s amazing iPad: a book is presented as a reproduction of the traditional stack of bound pieces of paper. Going from one page to the next is accompanied by an animation of it being turned, even with the sound of paper being rustled. While you keep thumbing pages, however, the stack stays equally thick on either side, turning the metaphor into a lie, into digital kitsch. It feels wrong and it is wrong. Metaphors are useful because we do not really want to know what goes on in the digital maze under the bonnet that the operating system hides. Superfluous visual noise doesn’t make the reading any easier, it just presumes that we’re too stupid to notice the difference between a stack of glued paper and a battery-driven piece of plastic. If people really wanted to emulate the whole physical experience, why not give us the musty smell of old books, the scent of printing ink?

Worse than those misguided and patronizing metaphors is the fact that publishers can no longer decide which typeface their text is set in. Apple provides just five (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, Verdana), and only one of them (Palatino) can be considered a book face suitable for reading on a screen. Somehow, the dichotomy seems weird between cool aluminium shapes, high-tech displays and amazing technology on the one hand, and wooden bookshelves on the other, as a metaphor for an online bookshop which provides books that look older on screen than they do in the real world. Perhaps the individual design departments responsible should talk to each other? The industrial designers certainly seem to be ahead of the User Interface people at Apple.

Still, while electronic books have a way to go (the Kindle is actually a little further ahead in typographic matters), there are signs that the web will soon allow the same degree of typographic refinements that we’re used to on traditional paper. Not only can we use every existing typeface to be displayed in a browser, but new mark-up languages will give us typographic treats like ligatures, small caps and old style figures that printers in the 15th century developed for their books which we still consider benchmarks today. If only somebody could invent a battery that lasted as long as paper does.

ONCE I KNOW what topic I want to (or have to) write about, the most critical decision becomes inevitable: how to begin? No evening class in Creative Writing, no journalism course fails to mention how important the first sentence is for the impression a text makes upon the unprepared reader. Norbert Miller, a German literary historian, published a collection of essays about what he called this ‘radical decision’. The first sentence compresses the infinite space for reflection into a finite object, settling on one version out of a multitude of variations and possible strategies.

Consider these alternatives: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ and ‘One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.’

The first example is by the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who thus began his Paul Clifford. The second is, of course, from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. After a beginning like this, you know Kafka’s novel is not going to be light reading, while Bulwer-Lytton’s turn of phrase does not bode well if you’re looking for world literature. Its author gave his name to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The 2011 winner, Professor Sue Fondrie from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, wrote: ‘Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanesof a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories’.

If you spend any time reading press releases, this style of writing won’t surprise you, even though the topics may be less personal. Mixing as many unrelated metaphors as possible into one statement seems to be considered a high art in those circles. Many trades have developed their own style of templated writing. You can actually find bullshit generators online that provide ready-made statements, such as this from artybollocks.com: ‘My work explores the relationship between acquired synesthesia and emotional memories. With influences as diverse as Nietzsche and Roy Lichtenstein, new synergies are crafted from both.’

If that isn’t good (or bad) enough for your purpose, there are alternatives: ‘My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and skateboard ethics. With influences as diverse as Kierkegaard and John Lennon, new combinations are generated from both simple and complex meanings.’
Increasing levels of complexity, cliche and incomprehensibility are on offer. I am sure that there are bullshit generators for architects and designers somewhere. I haven’t bothered to look for them yet for fear of being infected.

Before one even gets to the first sentence, though, potential readers have to pass another obstacle: the title of the book. While the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest encourages people to write original lines just for the contest, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, commonly known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award that has been made annually since 2000. The winner is decided by a public vote on the Bookseller’s website. The very first award in 1978 went to a publication by the University of Tokyo Press about medical studies using laboratory mice with inhibited immune systems, accordingly but somewhat surprisingly titled Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.

The 2000 winner delighted with High Performance Stiffened Structures, published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Then there’s Highlights in the History of Concrete, by CC Stanley, published by the British Cement Association. It stormed the Oddest Title in 1994.

What is almost as difficult as starting a text is finishing it. At the end, you are supposed to offer some closure, like answering the rhetorical question posed in the first paragraph; revealing an unexpected answer to a problem that your article had discovered, or at least wrapping up your ramblings with a phrase that would make punters happy about just having grown older by 10 minutes reading it without immediate danger to their health. There could even be a conclusion that would add lasting benefit to all that intellectual activity.

This time, I got to my 800 words or so rather cheaply: a quarter are quotes. To get maximum benefit from reading this, you should look online for bullshit detectors and humorous literary awards. If nothing else, it’ll help against the dreaded Fear of the First Line: you can always do better.

I don’t think John edited my piece very much, but I did notice that he changed my British aluminium to the US aluminum. As you can see below, I would have insisted on my original spelling. No idea why one would ever change that word in the first place – in German word we also write (and say) Aluminium. John did me a favour though: he found the source for the Ovink quote below. Thank you, John, for that and for Codex.

“A typographer who hasn’t found the appropriate typeface may not have decreased the informational value of a text, but gave up the opportunity to considerably increase its effectiveness.”* So wrote G. W. Ovink, Dutch typographer and historian, way back before he knew any other media besides paper.

Every medium has always had constraints for the type that goes with it. Whether you design a newspaper, a poster, a stamp or a website: you have to consider the technical environment, the reader, the client, the content. As the surfaces of substrates used for printing got smoother, the resolution of type went up along with it. If you look at a Gutenberg Bible through a magnifying glass, you’d never believe the craters, bumps and blotches that look like gorgeous letters from a safe reading distance. Bright and shiny, smoothly coated paper for high-quality offset printing requires the letters to be sharp and well-defined, even though the human eye doesn’t like too much contrast. Technology, being what it is – a means to promote itself if not mankind – kept providing more resolution and thus invisible detail than we ever needed. Once printing could hardly be more refined, along came the Cathode Ray Tube, and all the high definition that the suppliers of typesetting and printing equipment had declared not only inevitable but vital, was broken down into crude bits of colour, red, green and blue only. Type suddenly looked like Lego bricks when compared to the refinement a printer like Bodoni had been capable of at the beginning of the 19th century, long before photosetting and offset printing, let alone coated stock.

The web has always just been bad paper. Now it’s starting to look like good paper and designers will have to treat it as such. But as always at the beginning of a new paradigm, we have to imitate the old one while we get used to the new possibilities that those over a certain age always consider a challenge. Apart from what technology will allow us to do, there are physical laws — our eyes, our brain, light, contrast; we cannot ignore those if we want to communicate. Cultural parameters like reading habits, literary culture (or lack of) – our deeply embedded fear of change, all these give an excuse to imitate the old even though there are no technical reasons to do so. But we read best what we read most.

Every new medium raises the same questions. Things which were thought mature in one media will take a while to mature in a new one. Look at the new electronic books, particularly those on Apple’s amazing iPad: a book is presented as a reproduction of the traditional stack of bound pieces of paper. Going from one page to the next is accompanied by an animation of it being turned, even with the sound of paper being rustled. While you keep thumbing pages, however, the stack stays equally thick on either side, turning the metaphor into a lie, into digital kitsch. It feels wrong and it is wrong. Metaphors are useful because we do not really want to know what goes on in the digital maze under the bonnet that the operating system hides. Superfluous visual noise doesn’t make the reading any easier, it just presumes that we’re too stupid to notice the difference between a stack of glued paper and a battery-driven piece of plastic. If people really wanted to emulate the whole physical experience, why not give us the musty smell of old books, the scent of printing ink?

Worse than those misguided and patronizing metaphors is the fact that publishers can no longe decide which typeface their text is set in. Apple provides just five (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, Verdana), and only one of them (Palatino) can be considered a book face suitable for reading on a screen. Somehow, the dichotomy seems weird between cool aluminium shapes, high-tech displays and amazing technology on the one hand and wooden bookshelves on the other, as a metaphor for an online bookshop which provides books that look older on screen than they do in the real world. Perhaps the individual design departments responsible should talk to each other? Or does Steve Jobs not have such great taste after all?

Still, while electronic books have a way to go (the Kindle is actually a little further ahead in typographic matters), there are signs that the web will soon allow the same degree of typographic refinements that we’re used to on traditional paper. Not only can we use every existing typeface to be displayed in a browser, but new mark-up languages will give us typographic treats like ligatures, small caps and old style figures that printers in the 15th century developed for their books that we still consider benchmarks today. If only somebody could invent a battery that lasted as long as paper does.


* Ovink, G. W. Legibility, atmosphere-value and forms of printing types. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1938, p. 177.

Usually, I deny these requests because I don’t like making predictions about subjects I don’t know. But they insisted, and in the end I sent them this little piece:


Rethink Design, Redesign Thinking.
As a designer, I like the future.

After centuries of being dominated by technology – from cutting wood to printing negatives, from baking mud bricks to reinforcing concrete – designers of all disciplines now have the tools to present and make anything imaginable. There is no excuse for not coming up with new concepts. Designers and architects can no longer blame their shortcomings on the limits of technology. There will always be clients to blame – that has not changed since the Pope asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of that little chapel in the Vatican.

The best thing, however, is the fact that we are beginning to realize something else: we have talents that go beyond making things work well and look good. We can also take apart ideas, look at them, throw away what is not needed and put them back together again. Designers can redesign thinking. And we need to, because nobody else will.

***

Dear Mr Spiekermann,
My name is Rajeev Saroy and I am currently studying Graphic Communication at the University of Wolverhampton. The final year of my degree requires me to write a dissertation on a topic of interest related to a major subject within my degree. Football is a very big part of my life and I have always questioned the typography on football t-shirts. This is the subject that I have chosen to explore and investigate.
I am having great difficulties in gathering information around my chosen subject and I have put together a few questions that I would like you to answer in as much detail as you possibly can.

1.     Who designs the typefaces that are employed on football t-shirts?

2.     Why is this information limited and very difficult to get hold of?

3.     Why is it that many football teams cannot choose their own shirt numbers and fonts?

4.     In the English Premier League, all teams are obliged to obtain the same typeface. Who authorises this?

5.     Typefaces and the arrangement on football t-shirts is special job for graphic designers. How many designers have contributed towards this that you are aware of?

6.     If typefaces are not designed by Graphic designers, who has created them in the past and who has it been approved by?

7.     Do FIFA, UEFA and the FA have a set of rules and regulations, which restrict the true form of type? Is it due to these rules that type is deformed, chopped and changed?

8.     Once a typeface is created, who approves it?

9.     Is typography neglected on football t-shirts? If the answer is yes, why is this? Is it down to mega corporations or is it due to the lack of typographic knowledge by football organisations?

10. Are there any contemporary typographers that can contribute their skills towards type on football t-shirts?

11. Can new/existing typefaces replace ones that have been manipulated?
If there are any issues or views that you would like to mention, please feel free to do so.
May I thank you for your time and co-operation.

RAJEEV SAROY.

***

Dear Rajeev,
most of your questions can only be answered by the people in the football business. How should I know who approves the design? Why do you ask me why this information is difficult to get hold of? Aren’t you the student who is supposed to do the assignment?

Could it be that you haven’t done your homework? Surely this is something the FA or FIFA will answer. Those are scary bureaucracies, but I’m not going to tackle them on your behalf.

There is plenty of information out there, on the blogs, on typophile.com. The makers of kit, like Puma, Umbro, Adidas et al commission this stuff, of course, because they make it.
One designer in London has actually designed type for football shirts (Puma?): Bruno Maag, of Dalton Maag.

Ask him, but do more of your homework first. If football is a very big part of your life, then get off your arse and look around. Of course it’s difficult, but it is also difficult for me to spend part of my spare time on a saturday answering emails from kids who haven’t even looked at the information from the associations, the makers of kit.

Being a student means learning to learn, not simply writing an email and hoping that somebody else will do the work for you. There was a world before Google.

Certain artefacts are not attributable to an artist, a designer, or an architect. I had always referred to those as apocryphal. Not anonymous, because the authors were known, but the results of their labours were not deemed worthy of a credit. What has been called secondary architecture is mostly apocryphal and responsible for the look and feel of our cities way more than ‘real’ architects would like to admit. Apocryphal work by publicly employed architects and designers ranges from street lights to bus stops, park benches, transformer kiosks and sewage works to paper forms, wayfinding systems and the corridors of hospitals and other public buildings. Work by these uncredited authors does not have to be inferior to that of celebrated artists, it is the conditions under which the work has been done that is different. A city architect will not get sued if a building he planned collapses. Not even his administration will get blamed, as they usually manage to find an outside supplier who will answer for any mistakes or shortcomings. By the same token, he will not have his name in the press, nor engraved on a brass plate. Lack of consequences, good or bad, seems to deny those projects that final kick, as if the designer simply could not be bothered to stay a little longer, try a little harder and fight for his concept.

Vernacular design just exists. It doesn’t win prizes nor get discussed by critics or praised by clients. We have always had a soft spot for the hand-painted signs for barbers in Africa, hand-written menus in little local restaurants and lovingly arranged gnomes in suburban gardens. But after ‘vernacular’ had become a household word in the Eighties, professional designers started exploiting naive ideas and images for their commercial work. Letters from handmade signs were scanned and made into designer fonts, overalls worn by railway workers became trendy city chic and the garden gnomes became part of postmodern architecture.

While you could look at this transfer of no-name designers’ work into the professional mainstream as straight-forward, inexcusable exploitation, you could also argue that it takes us out of our ivory towers and puts us back in touch with ordinary peoples’ aesthetic. Perhaps we can learn something from those who may have no ambitions to change the world of design as we know it, nor formal training. They probably wouldn’t even use the word ‘design’ for what they do. They just draw plans, paint signs and type on keyboards, using whatever software or fonts come with their cheap machine. We could learn that design, architecture, even art depends on natural talent as much as on academic training. Vernacular design also seems to work fairly well without knowledge of all the constraints and rules we are taught at schools and universities. I am not proposing that self-taught engineers start drawing up plans for nuclear power stations or that administrative assistants write and lay out forms for social security applicants. (Come to think of it, that’s what most of those forms in most countries look like.)

I do remember the one thing that attracted me to the vernacular: the joy of achievement that spoke through a lot of that work. Not because they were aware of having solved a major problem, saved humanity from starvation or reinvented their respective disciplines. But having witnessed an artifact made where none had existed before, the laypersons, the apocryphal designers, probably enjoy the results of their efforts more than we professionals do with all our knowledge of what went wrong, how good it could have been and how misunderstood our true genius generally is.

That brings me back to Las Vegas: nothing there will win a design prize. No building, no gaming console, no graphics. But millions of visitors come to the city that has no reason to exist, other than offering an uncomplicated way to get older by a few hours or days, while taking away our superfluous cash. Cheap weddings and divorces in a place that manages to quote all the styles ever built seems enough to attract more people than all the modern art museums ever will. Perhaps even now and again we need to go to Las Vegas to eat some humble pie.

Perhaps we Germans should be glad that we have created at least one world-famous and perhaps even popular style, but, know-alls that we are, we have to point out that the Bauhaus was much more than a simple style. Having been invented in Germany (if not entirely by Germans), it had to have a theory as well as a serious message to mankind.

Herbert Bayer paraphrased the Bauhaus proposition as ‘combining the areas of utilitarian design, after researching their constituent elements, under the purpose of “Bau” (German for building or construction)’. ‘Researching their elements’ meant discussing economical, social, formal and ethical topics to form a theoretical, scientific basis for design, in order to move away from personal, purely artistic attitudes. ‘Bau’ meant every artefact, not just buildings made from stone or steel.

One of the main problems with most of what we know about the Bauhaus (and other periods or styles, for that matter) is that we have only seen these artefacts filtered through some intervening technology: photographs of buildings; scans of book pages, more often than not reproductions of reproductions and hardly ever at the original size. This process tends to be kind to the printed pieces from the Bauhaus workshops. What was actually fairly crude typesetting from a very limited choice of fonts and plain letterpress printing on bad paper, today appeals to us as lovingly handmade, put together by charming, bespectacled gentlemen, sporting interesting facial hair-styles, under enameled lampshades in cosy mid-European ateliers. I bet the poor compositors who had to work to detailed sketches from designers such as El Lissitzky hated every minute of it. They would have much rather set straightforward columns of plain type instead of having to compose impossible illustrations from metal rules and 12-pica full points. At the same time it must have been frustrating for Lissitzky and his colleagues to have their imagination constrained by the tight limits of a mechanical craft that was more rule-based than the most Teutonic of engineers could have wished.

Crude as it was, this new way of constructing pages, rather than simply setting them from the top down and centred, soon created a demand. In 1928, Bayer observed that more than 50 per cent of the orders taken by printers in Frankfurt were specified to be set in the ‘Bauhaus Style’. By that time this had been reduced to big dots and heavy bars or, worse still, ornaments and imitations of nature by means of typographic materials. The original concept of being true to the material had come full circle.

If the Bauhaus concept had already been reduced to a mere style as early as 1928, while it was still going – perhaps even as strong as in the beginning – how can we be surprised that today a red bar is enough to evoke it? What would it mean today to be ‘true to the material’ when the material consists of invisible noughts and ones? How would we define ‘utilitarian design’ when we are supposed to invent experiences and virtual worlds for the consumer to get sucked into?

What’s left? Discussing economical, social, formal and ethical topics may well be desirable again when we design not just artefacts but processes, politics and, in fact, our future. Connecting these issues under the topos of design is what the Bauhaus invented. Creating networks, thinking across disciplines. What we call networks but tend to only get in the shape of cables is the way out for designers. The way out of their isolation, caught between clients asking for free pitches and competitors ready to do the same work for half the fee. The way out of the alienation and isolation caused by unlimited technology, which, by definition, is irresponsible.

If the red bar on my letterhead reminds me of this premise, I can live with the fact that, for most people, the Bauhaus is just another style.

When Japanese products first turned up in the West, they were cheap and generally not very challenging technically. Those were the days when Japanese companies would hide their identity behind English or better still, American-sounding names like Bridgestone, Panasonic, JVC, and NEC. A product from Japan was generally a poor imitation of the real thing and lacked originality. Price was the main feature, brand loyalty unlikely.

It was easy for the established brands to exploit widespread prejudice against Asian products and dismiss them as inferior. How could a country that nobody knew much about and that had been devastated by nuclear bombs possibly challenge western standards? Didn’t they all still sleep on the floor in wooden houses, eat rice out of wooden bowls and communicate with primitive brush strokes?

In the late Fifties, when they were first seen in the USA, Japanese cars looked like pocket-sized versions of large American models, fins and all. The first models did very badly in the USA. Pocket-sized, however, was the operative word: while in the US bigger was better, Japanese products always had to deal with the fact that a population of 100m has to live on a narrow coastal strip along a few rather small islands. Things made in Japan were small and kept getting smaller because a normal household there has as much space at its disposal as one car does in America. Japan has no natural resources, no room for landfills and a culture that doesn’t like ostentatious display of wealth. (The first facts may actually be the reason for the third). The opposite of Texas, as it were. Making things well and as small as possible seemed to be as natural to a Japanese engineer as over-engineering was to his German colleague. Where else would you find a book describing 101 ways to package an egg? The package itself was not seen as something merely to guarantee safe transportation, to be discarded at the end of that journey, but as serving its own aesthetic purpose.

It was in this spirit that in 1979 Sony introduced the first truly portable music player, the Walkman. It didn’t need to look like a traditional tape-recorder, because its purpose was to package music, not cassettes. It was also the first device that isolated its users from the world around them by introducing headphones as the only output for sound. Anybody who has ever travelled on public transportation in Tokyo will appreciate why that can be a blessing for both sides. With the Walkman, Sony had become a major global brand and a quality standard.

While Japanese products stood for mass production before, now they symbolized innovation. Suddenly, hitherto unpronounceable brands like Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Hitachi or Toyota not only became household names in the West, but also stood for premium brands that didn’t need to be cheap to sell. Some of the biggest Japanese companies still make products under western-sounding pseudonyms: Epson (Son of Electric Printer, really!) printers are made by Seiko Epson Corporation from Nagano, Roland synthesizers by Rorando Kabushiki Kaisha from Shizuoka and Bridgestone is still the trade name of Kabushiki-gaisha Burijisuton from Fukuoka. In other cases, the Japanese language provides a nice consonant-vowel pattern, making names like Nikon, Canon, Honda, and Nissan, sound pleasant and instantly familiar to western ears.

It has, however, taken Japanese brands a long time to be confident about their heritage. About 10 years ago, we worked with Lexus to reposition its brand in Europe. When we told the gentlemen who came to visit from Japan that it was a good idea if it owned up to being Japanese instead of pretending to be a pseudo-Mercedes of unknown origin, they thought we were quite mad. We showed them that Japanese qualities like modesty, precision and attention to detail produced cars that afforded the utmost luxury: the absence of stress. Luxury doesn’t have to mean ostentatious displays of gold chrome, but can also mean a Zen-like concentration on the essential. They never quite believed us, and it has taken Lexus another decade to arrive at the current positioning which is self-confident and relaxed.

Japanese brands don’t have to prove anything anymore. They are now imitated by those they tried to emulate 40 years ago. In a globalized world, only authentic brands will survive, and heritage has become a virtue, not something to hide. Cheap products now come from elsewhere. In a country without oil, gas or minerals, the human brain has become the most powerful resource. The lesson we can learn here in Europe is that progress is not about making more, but better.

We run our business by sharing responsibility among nine partners. Each of us run project teams. We do not take money from faceless networks and don’t have to be accountable to their controllers. We alone decide who we work for and how we organize ourselves. And we put our money where our mouths are: we are shareholders and interested in the long view.
Most design consultancies or branding agencies (pick your own name) offer pretty much the same type of work. It is how they go about their work that makes the difference. It is a question of attitude, personality, even morals.

The current crisis is also a crisis of values: are people accountable for what they do? Is success rewarded with fat premiums but failure paid for by society? Can we carry on asking for growth as the only way forward? Do we need new values?

Even designers are not only judged by the visible results of their work, but more and more so by how they achieved them. Originality, personality, accountability are new buzzwords. Attitude is more interesting than cleverness.

Brands are successful when they when they are authentic, when they show attitude. They show how they make products, how they treat their people, how they look at the future. Cheap stuff – the What – will still be made in China and elsewhere. Complex processes – the How – are designed here.

THESE DAYS, even cities and countries are branded like washing powder. When I hear a line like ‘London is the creative capital of Europe,’ (or was it ‘the World’?), the first thing I ask myself is whether this is the result of objective research, a tabloid invention or another government campaign to take peoples’ minds off increasing inflation, prohibitive property prices, terrible traffic and weird weather. Yet there is some truth behind the slogan. I live and work in Berlin, San Francisco and London, and there is something different about the British capital.

Berlin today is made up of many cities: the old Prussian capital, leftovers of Nazi pomposity, ruins from the War with patched-up bullet-holes on every surviving building, post-war capitalist planning in the West and socialist architecture in the East, plus 18 years of post-post-war developments. A history of disruptions. Low prices attract artists and would-be artists, but hardly any corporate headquarters or serious businesses. Nobody in Berlin has jobs, but everybody has ‘projects’.

London, on the other hand, is the product of centuries of continuity. Everything that has ever happened on the British Isles, from the Roman occupation to the days of the Empire, from Nazi bombing to Thatcher’s hardcore capitalism, has manifested itself in this city. You get to live in one of the centres of the known universe if you are prepared to put up with all the inadequacies, bad air, horrible traffic, atrocious services and ridiculous prices. If you survive in London, nothing will scare you. And having managed to do so is a great boost for anybody’s self-confidence. Walking (or, in mycase, cycling) through the streets of Clerkenwell, I notice that the average age of everybody out there must be half mine. The way they go about looking busy while stroking their iPhones, the fashion they pretend not to wear and the bars, cafes and restaurants they frequent all suggest that nobody earns their money making anything physical anymore. Which leaves ‘invisible earnings’ as their main contribution to the economy. That term was invented for the City, where people make their money by betting other peoples’ cash on anything that grows, flows or might one day be manufactured. However, the Square Mile turned out to be fuelled by greed more than by expertise, and the sex appeal has disappeared with the bonuses.

Enter the creatives. If we place anybody in this category who works in film, TV, publishing, advertising, fashion and design, we realise that practising these occupations poses no danger to anybody. In other words: if all the creative businesses went on strike tomorrow, we wouldn’t immediately notice. Electric power would still be generated, breads baked and concrete mixed. Trains might still leave platforms (which, looking at Britain from a German perspective, is a small miracle in itself), the Congestion Charge would be enforced, newspapers printed and hearts transplanted. But what of the newspaper features? The pictures? The different styles of headlines, the characteristic look of your favourite magazine? If you’ve ever been to a country without advertising (I used to live next door to Eastern Germany), you may have realised how drab everything looks, and developed a longing for even the most stupid washing powder advertisement.

Imagine, for a moment, a typical high street without any advertising at all. An attractive thought at first, until you realise that even neon signs and advertising hoardings deliver crucial information, perhaps decoration and sometimes even amusement. And who would want to go back to the undesigned objects from the past? The complexity of technology may need to be hidden from us for our own good, but the look and function of surfaces and interfaces cannot be left to the engineers and marketing people alone. Things may just about work without designers, but don’t we also derive pleasure from using objects, physically and aesthetically? Without fashion we’d all be forced to wear the same practical gear, Mao-style. Refreshing for some of us for a while perhaps, but every man knows what women are capable of if they haven’t bought a new pair of shoes for awhile. You get my drift: us creatives may not save lives, and mankind would certainly continue to exist without our involvement.

However, we have important roles to play. The first one is to put icing on the cake of capitalism, no doubt about that. The other one could befor us to use our unique talents to actually solve real problems. We can visualise thoughts, ideas, issues. That is a very powerful gift. Also, in spite of all the iPhoning, teleconferencing, button-pushing and Facebooking going on, we like to be around each other. The more creative talent you have in one place, the more you attract. We’re not afraid of moving into ‘bad’ areas, we like to try exotic foods, hang out with interesting people from faraway places, listen to strange sounds, read material that is incomprehensible to outsiders and generally treat bugs as features. Where could there be a better environment for this species than in London? One good thing about Britain’s colonial past is the fact that half the world speaks English as their first language, while the other half takes courses. Many smaller countries are already bilingual. Try learning Dutch or Swedish: impossible – they’ll always answer back in English. Still, nobody speaks it as well as you do here in Britain. If you could be bothered to learn another language, you could appreciate that there are other ways of seeing and saying things. If you could get your tongues out of your cheeks now and again, the contribution London makes to the creative trades, industries and businesses could be even greater. Nobody is asking you to become German and actually make things.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2008