Expressing the human energy of piano music, the identity for the 2012 Australian National Piano Award (ANPA) presents a system of striking kenetic drawings using light. The result allows for a flexible set of identity components. Each one of the identity set is based on a different piece of music and by tracing the energetic movements of the pianist’s hands, gives the music an immediate visual form.

Photography: Nick Kreisler

Night after night, crowds of pedestrians huddled on Princes Bridge in the Australian city of Melbourne to watch a dazzling neon spectacle on the roof of the Allen’s Sweets factory. First, a giant twist-wrapped sweet would light up, then a yellow spaceship soared above a toffee before exploding into colorful sparkles. The logo of Allen’s Kool Mints appeared with the word “cool” flashing repeatedly and, for the finale, a couple of Anticol cough drops slipped out of a packet.

Known as the “skyline spectacular,” it was a fabulous free show courtesy of Allen’s, which had advertised its candies in animated neon lights above the factory since the mid-1950s. But when the area was redeveloped in the late 1980s, Allen’s elaborate neons were not included. A campaign was mounted to move them to another building, and Allen’s offered to contribute to the cost, but the city council vetoed the proposal, and the “skyline spectacular” disappeared. The saga of Allen’s neons is told by the typography designer Stephen Banham in his book Characters: Cultural stories revealed through typography, which explores how signs of different types, sizes and styles have defined Melbourne over the years. It would have been possible for him to have described almost any other city, town or village through its signage, but Mr. Banham chose Melbourne because he lives and works there, and knows its signs so well. The result is a spirited and perceptive cultural history of the city and its signage, which he tells with aplomb.

Graphic designers have long been fascinated by the vernacular signs that appear in public places, generally with a practical purpose, whether it is to sell something, to identify our whereabouts or to alert us to danger. When the American designer Robert Brownjohn moved from New York to London in 1960, one of the first things he did was to drive around the streets taking photographs of the signage. It was his way of getting to know his new city.

We all make similar judgments about places based on their signs, often without realizing that we are doing so. You do not need a doctorate in typography to spot the National Debt Clock when heading up Sixth Avenue to Times Square in New York, or to enjoy watching Lucozade, the fizzy health drink, being poured into a glass on an illuminated sign on the road from Heathrow Airport to central London.

The stories behind such signs can be engaging. The National Debt Clock was installed in 1989 by a New York real estate developer, Seymour Durst, who was concerned that his compatriots were overly complacent about the extent of the U.S. national debt. (It was less than $3 trillion then, and is now over $15 trillion.) And when the 50-year-old Lucozade sign was dismantled in 2004, local residents were so upset that they lobbied for its return. Unlike the efforts to save the “skyline spectacular” in Melbourne, their campaign was successful.

As Mr. Banham points out, an intriguing aspect of public signage is that it often paints a deeply idiosyncratic picture of its location. If you walk along a street, many of the signs you see will still be serving the purpose for which they were put there, but others will be obsolete. They may be advertising defunct products, or identifying a company that has long since left a building. These “ghost signs,” as they are called, usually survive by accident, because no one has bothered to remove them, or they were covered up for years only to be exposed during construction work. As a result, they give us random glimpses of the past.

I live in Shoreditch, once one of the poorest parts of London, which has changed radically in recent years. Gentrification has brought many benefits — organic food stores, great restaurants and art galleries, a farmer’s market, even a local airport in London City — but it has erased elements of the old Shoreditch. Among the things I miss the most are the “ghost signs” like the one above the long empty, now demolished Victory Cafe on Hackney Road. The area seems duller without them, and less distinctive.

In Characters, Mr. Banham considers the signs — past and present — that have characterized Melbourne. Some of them relate to historic events, like the neon cyclist outside a cycle store in Carlton, which was opened by Nino Borsari, the Italian cycling champion, when he found himself stranded in Australia after the outbreak of World War II. So famous did “Borsari’s Corner” become that an Italian president, Giuseppe Saragat, gave a televised speech there on an official visit in 1967.

Other signs evoke social changes. So many Italian immigrants came to live in Melbourne during the postwar years that the manager of the Fitzroy Swimming Pool had the words “Aqua Profonda” painted beneath the “Deep Water” sign. He was worried that Italian children might not understand the English version. During the same period, a flurry of Italian restaurants opened hoping to cash in when the city hosted the Olympic Games in 1956. The slender neon lettering that spelled out their names was dubbed “spaghetti type.”

Many of the signs in Characters are part of Melbourne’s industrial heritage. The flamboyant candy manufacturer, Macpherson Robertson, treated the city to a particularly theatrical sign. He called his company “MacRobertson” and wrote an ornate “signature” as its logo, which he spelled out above his factory in some 1,100 light bulbs that switched on one by one.

His sign has vanished, but another local landmark has been luckier. The neon “Skipping Girl,” known as “Little Audrey,” that appeared above the Nycander and Co. Vinegar factory in 1936, was removed when the building was demolished in 1968. The public outcry prompted Nycander’s new owner to commission a replica, which was installed nearby, even though no one knows who Little Audrey was, or why the sight of a skipping girl would make anyone want to buy vinegar.

The Allen’s skyline spectacular (1986) Back view, Erica Downward, photograph compilation . Images: State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection

Held annually by the RMIT University Design Research Institute, the Design Challenge throws open a social issue to teams of design academics and industry practitioners to address. This year the challenge focussed on the theme of Homelessness. The outcome of the finalist teams were exhibited in a series of three shipping containers positioned at Federation Square in Melbourne. The restricted space called for a very simple navigational system – adhesive tape on the floor led up the walls to the introduction panel of each project, ensuring that each project space was demarcated. The resulting exhibition was a great opportunity for design to be seen in a very public environment and attracted a lot of interest from passers-by. The identity of the exhibition was set in the Letterbox typeface League.

Some names are just made to be typographically interpreted. Or perhaps it is through the eye of the typographer that certain opportunities are seen and used as a basis of an identity. In briefing us on the identity project, Melbourne-based psychiatrist Dr. Dwyer stated that he wanted something ‘unique and completely typographic’. We started with the very essence of his profession – curiosity, compassion and creating balance – and gave this typographic form. The result is a picture of simplicity, hinting at the symmetry of the well-known Rorscharch test, whilst omitting the letters w, y and e (coincidentally pronounced as why). Like the proverbial ‘sculpture being liberated from the stone’, this identity above all shows the power of observation – that design is often not so much the creation of ‘the new’ but rather seeing the familiar in a new way.

Look Here: Considering the Australian Environment (1968)

Australian graphic design is going through a particularly interesting period at the moment — you may think that I’m about to talk about the current state of design work, its increasing international profile etc but I’m not. Instead I want to look at the other end of the equation – the growing interest in the origins and provenance of history Australian graphic design.

Up until a few years ago you could be forgiven for thinking that there was no such thing as Australian graphic design history. Other than Mimmo Cozzolino’s Symbols of Australia (1980), Geoffrey Caban’s A Fine Line (1983) and the quietly percolating AGDA Hall of Fame, very little of Australian graphic design has been recorded, documented let alone committed to a more detailed critique and review.

Part of a maturing graphic design culture is a knowledge of its past. Not for its sake but for the insight it can offer current and future practitioners, students and perhaps most importantly, as a way of telling the story of design to a broader public.

The tide of recently produced texts on aspects of Australian graphic design, some focussed on individuals – Alex Stitt¹; some on design projects – Les Mason’s Epicurean Magazine², the various designers behind The World Record Club³; and others on an entire design medium – Characters: Cultural Stories revealed through typography⁴, are encouraging others to follow suit and appreciate the practitioners and design culture that has preceded them.

From my own collection of Australian graphic design is a piece that is remarkable in both its form and content. Designed by the Melbourne-based firm Stitt & Weatherhead (Alex Stitt & Bruce Weatherhead), Look Here! Considering the Australian Environment (1968) is an extraordinary cultural document of its time yet appears curiously current.

Produced by the progressive publisher F.W Cheshire, Look Here! ‘is the first book to attempt a consideration of a number of aspects of the Australian environment together, and to discuss them in a way which will interest everyone, including the layman’⁵. Intentionally provocative, the texts are from a range of perspectives –architects (Robin Boyd, Daryl Jackson and David Saunders), town-planners (John Bayly and Fred Ledgar), an industrial designer (Grant Featherson), an advertising executive (R. Haughton James), a naturist (Vincent Noel Serventy) and an educationalist (Stephen Murray-Smith) and a writer (George Johnston). Edited by the eminent John Button, the book is based on a series of lectures by the Victorian Fabian Society.

Produced some eight years after Robin Boyd’s seminal book The Australian Ugliness (1960), it continues the ‘call to action’ for an emerging Australian identity in the midst of rapid social change. Whilst the writings within Look Here! are forceful, informed and passionate, its publically accessible tone avoids academic dictum.

But of course it was the design that first drew me to this book. Its dramatic grainy black and white photography combined with the sparse, asymmetrically-composed typography makes for a compelling visual journey, long before being drawn into the wonder of the words themselves.

What is particularly refreshing about Look Here! is how appropriate the design is to the content – the stark social documentary style of the images works in perfect tandem with the simple grid system and understated typographic flavour. The use of a seriffed text face allows the book to avoid the predictable complexion of a ‘modernist’ book. The quiet and sombre handling of the text also respects the authority of the arguments by avoiding the more explicit typographic fashions of the day (you would never know the same designers produced the joyful Jigsaw project).

However where the book design demands drama, it more than delivers. The cover image of Look Here! is unapologetically aggressive. What better personifies an argumentative and provocative text than the traditional Australian weapon of choice –a jagged, broken beer bottle.

First published in Desktop Magazine Issue 280 (March 2012)

1. Alex Stitt AutoBiographics (2011) Stitt, Alex. Hardie Grant
2. Les Mason, Epicurean Magazine Hofstede Dominic (2011) The Narrows
3. It’s another World Record – Album Cover Art. Hocking, Geoff (2011) Casbooks
4. Characters: Cultural stories revealed through typography. Banham, Stephen (2011) Thames and Hudson and the State Library of Victoria.
5. Front outer book jacket notes from Look Here: Considering the Australian Environment (1968)

Commissioned by the Frankston City Council, this rather monumental ‘urban marker’ gestures people arriving at the railway station to the beautiful Frankston Foreshore Beach. Although the piece has only just been installed (much to the bemusement of passers-by) it already cuts a striking presence in the streetscape – and it should, it weighs in at 2.4 tonne and stands some 1.2 metres high (becuase it was also designed to be public seating). It is part of a more extensive set of works we like to call the ‘polite signage’ program. See coverage of this project by The Age newspaper.

Developed for the textile homewares company Worldweave, this neat anagram serves as a concise visual shorthand for their fuller name. This identity was also one of the first commercial usages of the studio-produced typeface Bisque.

Core Identity

Identity with the perpetually endless colour spectrum system

 Typographic variant developed for (but not exclusive to) Valentines Day

Commissioned for the boutique florist, Judy Chirnside, this identity features a completely customised titling that operates across a (handmade) chromatic spectrum that is representative of the emotional reasons for purchasing flowers. Using this system, the colour of the typography changes accordingly from a very bright, happy pink right through a range of rich greens to a solemn deep blue. In this way, the identity addresses the organic nature of the product as well as the range of customer emotional states. The identity was applied across packaging, livery and their online presence.

To ensure legibility, the typographic titling comes in two size variations – one for large usage (left) and another for smaller reproduction (right).

As a complete rethink of public behavourial signage, a system of modular typographic in-ground signage plates were designed and installed in Frankston, a southern suburb of Melbourne. Taking a far more polite tone than the usual regulatory voice reminds the public as to the reason to ‘do the right thing’. Commissioned by the Frankston City Council, it is part of a bigger public strategy project addressing how people think about and use their local area. As the municipal bylaws often change from area to area, it was important that the plates work in singular configuration (below) as well as a set of multiples (above). The term please, please smile lends a more optimistic tone to the presence of the signage.

Built as a paper city to reflect the rich storytelling aspects of over 170 years of council correspondence, the exhibition Paper City was a curational collaboration between Stephen Banham, Christine Eid and Andrew May. Commissioned by the City of Melbourne, the project involved many months of researching the archives and collections held by the council. More information can be found here including a wonderful short film of the exhibition installation. The exhibition resulted in record patronage to the City Gallery and fostered a great deal of public interest in the letterhead as a form of cultural expression.