Noisy Decent Graphics

Burn the heretic!

I know this is a bit passé now, given the headlong rush that is Interwebiverse 2.6 or wherever we've got to. But I'm interested to see how many people agree with me about Poke's much-ballyhooed Good Things Should Never End website. Ben's already posted about it, of course, and he likes it.

I don't.

We should begin by acknowledging that this doesn't matter two hoots: lots and lots of people (like Ben and advertising bloggers Agency Tart and Scamp) seem to like it very much. And no piece of communication is going to please all the people all the time.

But I've heard very few dissenting voices on this one, and I wondered if there were any in our congregation.

My biggest problem with it is that it's boring (to me, anyway). The little bees took much too long filling up their honey jar for a start. Then I was cast into an increasingly familiar world of trendy illustrated characters - somewhere between Stefan's Daily Monster and Amos toys. And true to their billing, they go on and on and on. And on.

You're supposed to share the wonders of this site with others, by clipping little animations and posting them on your own site or blog, thusly:

Oooh. Bird goes round. Do it again, bird. Oooh. He did. And hey presto: Orange has free ad space on Noisy Decent Graphics.

The one bit I was intrigued by was a television thingy called Buzz, who apparently wanted to speak to me. Being neither five years old nor congenitally stupid, I knew Buzz was just a clever bit of software. But I gave him a go. Oh dear. Maybe not so clever.

This sort of content is supposed to engage you as an active participant, but the technology is still so feeble compared to your own brain, it's surely stultifyingly limited.

There's an interactive TV ad too, in case you weren't aware (by the suitably edgy-sounding Weapon 7). I'm pretty curmudgeonly about iTV too - it always seems a rather lacklustre alternative to Proper Telly. Like the online version, it's been immaculately produced. I just don't want to spend ages peering at a screen (of any kind), hunting out hidden freebies. Our lives are measured in mere decades, people.

Scamp claims the site will engage you for at least half an hour. If it does, you surely need a bit more going on in your life. If you're really desperate to fill a half-hour at the desk, why not expand your vocabulary and feed the world at Free Rice? Or you could astound yourself for real with a couple of the talks on TED. Or you could read a damn book.

God I sound old.

The bitching is back

Yesterday was all very fluffy and calm, wasn't it? Don't worry, we're back on the good stuff now.

Dave Oscroft of Neighbour wanted to let me know about a piece of copywriting that drives him mad. It's this one. And I can't say I blame him. Here's what he said:

"Sometimes I think copywriters can try and make themselves known too much, if you know what I mean. Trying to make copy sound like someone's 'thought about it' can sometimes make it sound really amateur. Not sure if you've seen an ad for a snowboard company, not sure of the brand or anything helpful like that, but it's on the tube at Tottenham Court Road, Central Line, heading east. It's a big load of copy on an ad that sounds so smug and 'copywritten' it made me want to read the London Paper just to avert my eyes... it's everything I hate about copywriting!"

I think he's absolutely right. Here's the copy close up:

On the one hand, this is easy prey, isn't it? How much of this sort of dross is there in the world of commercial communications? But still: it matters. It certainly matters to Dave. And quite right too: it's shit. It's like someone stuffed a Howies catalogue and an old Blackadder video into an Innocent blender and hoped for the best.

I don't think we need dissect it much further (tempted as I am). But I will point out that whoever wrote it clearly doesn't understand the phrase "beg to differ". Either that, or they don't know how to use their "but" properly. And the moment one finds oneself writing the line, "'All right, Smarty-Salopettes,'" is a moment to lay the keyboard aside and have a long lie down.

Easy (and fun) as it is to mock and sneer, what's nice about this story is that it proves people care about words. There's a myth that no one reads body copy any more, but Dave did. And it got a reaction. Because he does read, and he does care. He is rightly pissed off when a brand subjects him to this sort of patronising, sub-standard nonsense.

It's just a shame that it's usually the bad stuff that catches our attention. The aforementioned Howies and Innocent are both examples of brands whose writing is so good people notice and comment. But good copy, like good design, is often about getting out of the way and letting the message come through. Which means you often don't even notice how good it is. As Orwell famously said, "Good prose is like a windowpane."

Sometimes, though, you might want to decorate the windowpane. Which is great, as long as you can write so well that people enjoy your words for the sheer joy of the words themselves. But as this poster proves, you have to really, really know what you're doing.

A few leaves out of Ben's book

Sometimes nothing beats a good old-fashioned pun, does it?

I've so enjoyed seeing Ben's many leaves in recent weeks, that I thought I'd contribute a few of my own. I don't own a book of Pantone chips, unfortunately, so you'll have to guess. These were all taken on a recent walk with my dog, Harry. Nothing beats winter sunlight.

Blake Everingham is my new best friend.

"I'd have to say as a designer I enjoy working with writers. It simply opens up creative dialogue. However, I'll be blunt: I hate not having the same capacity for beautiful wording, thus working with a writer is also frustrating. Purely from my own lacking as a writer though. Otherwise, it's fun."

Blake, you say the nicest things. And you're the only contributor (thus far) from Across The Pond. Thanks.

As always, these things go both ways. When I'm working with a designer and they come up with some perfect, elegant visual idea, there's a big part of me going, "Bastard. I wish I could do that." But I love it too - it shakes the brain out of its verbal rut, and helps me think in new ways. Which is the whole point behind this dialogue I'm hoping to encourage. So thanks, Blake.

The delights of trash

I snapped this on the way out of our hotel room yesterday. I love forgotten old paperbacks like this, which always crop up on hotel bookshelves. (It was sitting next to the inevitable out-of-sequence Len Deighton, another hotel classic.)

In both its appearance and the writing within, this is pure trash. (I meant to scribble down a juicy quote to pass on, but time and children wait for no man.) Nevertheless, if you're anything like me (and anything like as old), it sparks a gentle little pang of nostalgia. It's the sort of book you find in your granny's house, or on those squeaky revolving racks in the Sue Ryder shop. They've become imbued with a sort of gentle, whimsical melancholy, and I can't help but love them, trash as they are. Perhaps I'll begin a collection.

(Stop Press: The internet, of course, has just robbed me of the charming sense of mystery around this book. A quick Google reveals that Wikipedia has everything you never wanted to know about Taylor Caldwell, and there's even an Appreciation Society. I'm trying to maintain my aforementioned gentle, whimsical melancholy, but it's not an emotion that easily survives an onslaught of cold, hard facts.)

Wonderful

I said I'd get more positive, so here it is. This is the sort of thing the Internet was made for: bringing wonder and knowledge to everyone. (Well, everyone with broadband, but that's a separate issue.)

If you haven't already seen The Last Supper in Detail, check it out: a 16 billion pixel (count 'em) rendering of Leonardo's great work. You can get closer to it here than you can in real life. It's fabulous.

Da Vinci Code nuts will no doubt be zooming in on this bit:

It reminds me of the British Library's equally gorgeous and democratising Turning The Pages project, which makes many of the Library's greatest treasures available online. Also well worth a look.

Huh?

Please tell me it's not just writers who notice things like this.

If you can't be bothered with the whole ad, I'm talking about the endline: 'We start with solutions, not problems.'

How exactly do they manage that, then? This is the sort of line that kind of sounds right, but is completely meaningless. Gives copywriters a bad name. Boo. Tut. Etc.

I promise to post something glowingly positive very soon.

Design consultancy homepages: an emerging theme?

As you might imagine, I spend a fair bit of time trawling design consultancy websites. I think you work best with people you admire, so I deliberately find designers whose work I like and then pester them. Eventually they agree to a meeting or tell me to go away. Happily, it's usually the former: designers are lovely. (All those featured below, remember I said that.)

Anyway, during my recent rovings, I have detected what seems to be something of a theme in the design website world. Can you spot it?

NB:Studio

FourIV

Pocknell Studio

Slater Design

Teviot

Apologies for singling out the above (especially the ones I work with), but it's quite striking isn't it? I know there are others, too, but these are the ones I've remembered. Have you seen any more?

Fuel to the fire

Oh dear. It seems 26 member John spotted a flock of pigeons gathering, and decided to chuck a cat at it. Brace yourselves, designers. (John's a freelance writer, so I've made an executive decision to save his career by protecting his identity.)

"This is generalising but I often find many designers think on the surface. They try and make things simply look better rather than communicate better. They don't get under the skin of the problem - as writers have to. This in turn leads to a feeling that some designers don't 'get' words and what they can do. Their eye is tuned into style and not content. They run scared of words. Too often they look at them as objects that clutter up a layout. I'll bet most of the designers I've worked with don't read books, or newspapers. They prefer the cosmetic lure of the eye-candy."

Blimey. John says he's generalising, and he certainly is. From my perspective, I genuinely haven't had the sort of negative experience John clearly has. I've certainly come across designers who seem to concentrate entirely on styling the surface, but I'm pretty sure even most of them picked up a book from time to time.

Indeed, one of my long-term design partners frequently turned up to the studio with imposingly hefty novels tucked under his arm - and hefty in a Tom Wolfe rather than a Tom Clancy sort of way. Mind you, he was very much an 'ideas-first' designer rather than a pure stylist. So maybe John's right.

Is he? And if he is, what's to be done about it - if anything? Maybe in some contexts style really is everything. Is it? Do you read books, designers? (Other than just the D&AD Annual and big books full of logos, of course.) I think you do. Go on, prove me right. (Or tell me why it doesn't matter anyway.)

Should designers try to write? Should writers try to design?

Richard gets the conversation off to a good start:

"Over the last few years there's been a fair about of chat about how great it is if designers can write. Only the other week, in Belfast, we heard Adrian Shaughnessy reiterate this idea. I like the idea. I'm a designer and enjoy messing about with words. I'm often heard to say, "I'm no writer, but what about this..." and confidently string words together for projects I'm working on. Problem is, when someone comes along and says, "I'm no designer but what about this..." us designers get seriously pissed off."

That last point is fascinating, and I'm sure it applies to many writers, too. But if you're any good in either capacity, why would you feel threatened by ideas from others?

Equally, I don't think we should let a lack of confidence in other disciplines stop us speaking up. My design ideas are always improved by the designers I work with - but that doesn't mean the original ideas are bad. (Not all of them, anyway.)

For example, I recently worked on a naming project, and I happened to have an idea for the logo, too. The designer liked it, and tweaked it in a way I hadn't expected, making the idea much clearer and more effective. Now it's going ahead, and it looks great.

Exactly the same happens with copy. Many times a designer or art director has said, as Richard does, 'I'm no writer, but what about...' Or, 'I know this isn't quite right, but what about...' As often as not, they're spot on. The copy itself might need a tweak, just as my logo did, but the ideas are bang on.

For me, this is one of the best bits of the job: sitting down with someone and bouncing ideas around. If they're any good, they'll come up with loads of things you'd never have thought of on your own. Some are verbal ideas, some visual. The best ones are usually a marriage of both. But they can come from either side. You can't stop people having ideas, and why on earth would you want to?

Ultimately, It's ideas that grab and persuade people - not typography and colour, or grammar and wordplay. Craft skills, used well, are the tools we use to make that idea sing. (Poor craft skills, of course, can bury an idea, often because they try too hard to be clever in themselves.) But the idea should come first. And anyone can have an idea.

Even account managers.

Morning all

I'm not quite sure why I've adopted a policeman's tone of voice for this first post - read into that what you will. But anyway - hello, and thanks for having me. I'll be here all week, as they say.

Apologies that I'm a bit late getting started, but I'm not actually at work right now. Instead, I'm in the midst of a long weekend at The Ickworth Hotel in Suffolk. That's how committed I am to this week's blogging.

Interesting room art at the Ickworth

So this Monday morning has begun, rather unusually, with a big fat Full English and a very nice massage in the spa. (There are other ways to convince young women to run their fingers through your hair and rub oil into your thighs, but they either demand a lot more effort or are considerably less legal.)

I'm a bit of a rambler, I'm afraid, so apologies for that. (His Majesty Stephen Fry seems to have coined a new phrase for the rambling blog: the 'blessay'. Which is nice. Or maybe ramblog?)

Anyway. As you probably know, my Big Idea For The Week is to get writers and designers talking to each other. I work mainly in the design field, but I do a bit in advertising too. As we all know, the difference in creative approaches is marked. In the latter, creative teams are made up of writer and art director, and it's a joint effort from brief to billboard. (Yes, there are other media, but none as alliterative.)

In design, however, the standard form remains to get the document, website or whathaveyou to the point where all that remains is to replace all that cod-Latin with real English. At which point my phone rings. Or, just occasionally, someone else's.

This is changing, thank Heavens, but it's still the norm.

Is it because designers couldn't give a fiddle-dee-dee about writing? I don't think so. (A few of my compatriots might disagree, as future posts will reveal.) Pretty well all the designers I work with seem to have at least a basic appreciation for what I do, and its value.

Is it the industry's name: design? Advertising is a non-creative-specific monicker. Maybe that's why people there are called 'creative' first and 'copywriter' or 'art director' second.

Is it history? Has the history of graphic design been one that moved from a primarily visual craft into broader communications, without letting go of its visual bias? There must be something in that, but more knowledgeable minds than mine will have better answers.

Is it money? Good writers don't come cheap (just as cheap writers rarely come good). Are we simply pricing ourselves out of the early stages of projects?

I'd love to hear your views. Thanks to everyone out there, and at 26, who's already chipped in. I'll be airing some of your thoughts as the week goes on, and I hope it'll stir some rumblings in the comments. Please stick your oars, noses and two penn'orths in whenever you feel the urge. (Or email me at mike [at] reedwords.co.uk) Thanks.

Hello Mike

So that's it from me for a bit. Next week it's Mike, all week. Again, I'm looking forward to reading some decent, properly spell checked posts. Play nicely and make sure you comment. Make him feel at home.

I'll see you next week.

Guest Writer: Mike Reed

Because of the success of the last guest writer I've gone and asked somebody else to host a week. Some of you (in fact lots of you) probably know the copywriter Mike Reed already.

In case you don't know him, he's a copywriter mainly for graphic design clients. He's been in the D&AD Annual, he's started an agency, he's written for good people like The Chase, The Partners and Howies and he's a member of the brilliant writers group 26 (which is endorsement enough in itself really).

So, next week, from Monday 3rd until Fri 7th he'll be taking the reins. Same rules as Henrietta; he's allowed to write whatever he wants under the broad umbrella of design.

To kick things off he's "planning a to open up the dialogue between designers and writers, and perhaps bring the two a little closer together".

So he wants you to email him and let him know what you love and what you hate about working with copywriters. No holds barred. The good, the bad and the ugly. He's also asked all the people at 26, so it should be good fun.

If you'd like to contribute, please email him mike at reedwords.co.uk.

It's me for the rest of the week and I'll remind you lot about Mike on Friday. I know you're all terribly busy.

Commissioned by Tower Hamlets Council

Tom went to have a look at this the other day. Great use of double yellows. (Triple yellows over here.) Apparently it's huge. Look at the parking sign on the lamp post for an idea of scale.

Anyway, he also spotted this.

That can't be right, can it? We don't think it is. What do you think?

Thank You Henrietta and introducing Beauty Week

That was pretty good, wasn't it?

I'd like to say a really big thank you to Henrietta, you guys seem to agree that she did a grand job.

Personally it was weird and exciting to log on every day and see someone else writing on here. As an experiment I think it worked well. It gave you all a rest from me and it added a slightly different flavour to the blog. Hits went up (not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing) and I noticed a few different faces around the place.

I really liked the 7 Rules of Showcasing Architecture in Print post, I'm in love with the Magnum book (more on that soon) and I'm really glad she saved me the trouble of posting about the Matthew Williamson exhibition. (There are a few more pictures of that on Flickr and the picture above is also from the show, well worth a visit.) The death of Barcelona street art post has been linked to all over the place. Let me know in the comments what you thought.

And now back to normal.

Well not quite. Speaking in the broadest sense possible most designers fall into two camps; Form or Function. Hopefully you've already noticed, but I'm very firmly in the Function camp. It's quite not as simple as that of course, as Michael Bierut is often pointing out.

There's a lot of Function on this blog and (maybe) not enough Form. So welcome to Beauty Week. A whole week of stuff that, well, stuff that just looks beautiful. No big theory, no grand ideas, just great looking stuff.

But before that, last night was the final episode of the amazing, Shakespearian, Sopranos. It was stunning. And that's as good a reason as any to direct you to Michael Bierut's Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos.

The Making of Magnum Magnum

Magnum Magnum comes out in November. Published by Thames & Hudson it is – as noted in the blurb – a book of unparalleled scale and ambition. It is a category killer, which is to say that this is the photography book of 2007.

Don’t call it a coffee table book – it’s bigger than that in every way. Showcasing no less than six works from each of every Magnum member there ever was, the resulting 400 or so photographs and accompanying texts make up a product of epic (390 x 320mm, 568 pages) proportions. It weighs 6.5kg and comes in a special carrycase with a handle. It is absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

Andrew Sanigar is commissioning editor at Thames & Hudson, and Magnum Magnum was all his idea. I know for a fact he’s been pretty busy with this over the last year or so, and I thought it would be interesting to ask him what is involved in putting a book like this together.

(Also, seeing as this is likely to be my last post before the return of NDG’s resident editor Ben I’m taking the opportunity to make it really really long…)

Henrietta Thompson for NDG: Why does the world need another book of Magnum photography?
Andrew Sanigar: This year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of Magnum by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David 'Chim' Seymour and George Rodger – the book celebrates the great photography created by Magnum during that time. The book is also the first and only time all the Magnum members, associate members (and the Estates of those who died while still Magnum members) have featured in one book – previous 'group' books don't have all of them. There is no group exhibition to celebrate the anniversary and Magnum very much see the book, particularly because of its size, scale and quality, as an exhibition you can keep at home.

HT: What makes it different from all the rest?
AS: Apart from featuring the full complement of photographers, as mentioned above, the six photographs by each photographer have been selected by another Magnum photographer and each set of six photographs is accompanied with a short commentary, written by the selecting photographer, about six photographs shown and the photographer who created them. It is a book with the voices of and insights from all the current members, so it is quite unlike any other photography book which might have one, two, possibly three author's voices and picture selections combined in the book. As a result, the book provides an exceptional insight into what makes a great photograph in the eyes and minds of photographers who are members of the world's greatest photographic collective. The idea of being reviewed/criticised/judged by one's peers is at the heart of the book and is what makes joining Magnum such a demanding exercise. Such high standards are what has largely driven the exceptional quality of Magnum photography, in both aesthetic and journalistic senses, over the last 60 years. It's very different from the rest in every sense.

HT: Is it difficult to produce a book of this size?
AS: Yes, it is not only physically difficult to print and bind, but relied on using the very, very best material to repro from – original prints supplied by the photographers and estates. It is also the largest and heaviest (and I think, most expensive book) Thames & Hudson has ever published.

HT: Who designed it, and why did he get the job?
AS: The designer was Martin Andersen, a freelance designer in partnership with his sister, Line, as AndersenM Studio. Martin has worked with us a number of times before, most notably on Magnum Ireland and Cartier. Martin has an exceptional sensitivity to photography books, a proven ability to make them look and feel amazing and has the best eyes and mind, in photo editing terms, of any book designer I know. We all worked closely with Brigitte Lardinois, who was the editor for the book, paired the photographers up, co-ordinated all the photographers in terms of their sending their selections and texts and Johanna Neurath, the Design Director.

HT: What challenges are involved with designing a photography book on this scale?
AS: Martin faced several challenges when making the design: a) How to make a coherent sequence/picture edit when only supplied with six photographs by a selecting photographer; b) how to achieve the same when a photographer selected more than six (sometimes we got eight, sometimes ten); and c) how to make sure the rhythm, pace and emphasis (which is crucial in getting photography books to work in the right way) was sufficiently varied (but without looking really whacky) when different people selected different photographers and each selecting photographer had their own criteria (i.e we didn't advise the photographers up front) when making their selections.
In 'normal' photography books, the designer either works with an author (or a single photographer) and therefore 'co-curates' the selection, or sometimes is presented with a larger edit, which the designer can edit down from when creating the layout, deciding on juxtapositions, rhythm, pace, etc. To have the work of 69 individuals, all in sequence, each of whom has been selected by 55 individuals (the balance is either estates or those too unwell to make selections), presents a huge challenge, not only in organizing everyone, getting their approval of the selections, etc, but in making it all stick as a coherent layout.

HT: What to your mind was the hardest sequence to put together and why?
AS: I'm not going to single any examples out, but generally the hardest ones were those where the photographer's output has a great deal of variety in terms of black and white or colour, and in terms of subject matter – with six photographs which has a lot of variation along those lines, it can prove challenging to get the layout to hold together. Martin did a great job in getting such harmony in those layouts.

HT: What do you feel is the most successful sequence?
AS: The ones with the most surprising selections, which didn’t show familiar work. There are a good number of younger Magnum photographers whose work is excellent and is brilliantly showcased in the book. That said, the sheer size of the book means, even if a photograph is very well known, you see it at a scale never seen before and that makes it fresh.

HT: I remember you mentioning something very interesting about the stock being an entirely new colour that was developed especially?
AS: The colour I think you're remembering is the spot colour used in the duotones and as the 'fifth' colour throughout the book. It isn't a colour you'll find in any Pantone book (or similar system) as it is a 'special' created by the printers, Steidl. The reason for using it was that we weren't getting a satisfactory result across the board with the duotone photographs – they looked perfectly good using standard Pantones, but they needed something extra special. The 'special' colour brought all of the duotones to life – some photographers have very intense, deep blacks in their black and white work, others have much more open, highlight detail-driven feel – the 'special' worked with all of them. It's down to our Production Director, Neil Palfreyman, and Gerhard Steidl and his team, that this worked so successfully.

HT: How is the typography organized?
AS: Inevitably, there's always a 'kit of parts' in terms of type sizes, hierarchy, etc, which one has in mind for the typography of a book. With such a page size, that notion, gets turned on its head. Suddenly, your running feet and folios aren't 7 point, they're 10 point, and 16 point becomes a comfortable and correct size for the text setting. Martin did a great job with the typography – it has all the attributes great typography in a photography book should have: It is modern and fresh, but is timeless – it won't date. Oh, and for the keen typespotters out there, all headings are in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and everything else (text setting, folios, running feet) is in ITC Garamond.

HT: What is the market like for a book such as this?
AS: Those with a love and appreciation of great photography primarily, but ultimately, given the range and exceptional quality of the material and the subjects represented, anyone with an interest in the last 60 years of human history and how that has been documented and represented.

HT: The images are so compelling and fascinating that often you are left wanting to know much more. How do you begin to caption a photography book such as this?
AS: With difficulty. The captions as created by the photographers are all of varying length, for a start, which makes the editing of them a challenge, and I do think that the reader should not be burdened with too much information – just enough. The book, as with many photography books, has very elegant, pared down captions. The fact that you want to know more having looked at a wonderfully evocative photograph is a very good thing – that simply demonstrates the power of a great photograph.

Matthew Williamson at the Design Museum

When she was director of London’s Design Museum Alice Rawsthorne got a lot of flack for putting on exhibitions about frivolous subjects such as Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik, and nominating the Gorrilaz for Designer of the Year. Her overly populist decisions had, if I remember rightly, something (although not everything) to do with her departure.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that – under Rawsthorne’s successor Dejan Sudjic – the Design Museum was putting on a Matthew Williamson exhibition.

Sudjic clearly understands design and its audience, and I suspect he may be trying to make that point with Williamson. (Oh, and here - but that was a while back). I’m not sure you could get a more frivolous and populist fashion designer than Matthew Williamson. This is not an intellectual, fashion/architecture-fusion label like Hussein Chalayan or Issey Miyake. Williamson is all handpainted peacock feathers, georgette, frills and sequins – it’s pure, unadulterated, fashion fashion fashion. 

I went along last week. I'm not sure if I was allowed to take these pics, but noone stopped me, so here they are. Exhibiting fashion in a way that ends up looking like an exhibition and not a posh shop is a skill that noone bar the V&A seems to have mastered yet. I think the Design Museum could have done better on this front, but it's nearly there. This is a sweet, compact exhibition, and I am so thrilled that it’s actually on that I’m not about to criticise it. (Much).

Fashion is one of the more accessible faces of design, and if it brings people to the end of Shad Thames to see it, therefore keeping the museum going, so much the better. I’d like to have seen a little more of Williamson’s processes and inspirations – more behind the scenes stuff, maybe take the intellectual content up a teensy bit at least... but the couture on display is impossibly intricate and lovely and provides more than enough eye candy to satisfy. And I believe that if the Design Museum is to really engage people, its directors need to know what people want to engage with.

Leftover interiors

Barcelona is a city full of the most surreal scenes. Just today I met a woman who kept a live white rabbit in her handbag, for example. Yesterday I saw – defiantly flouting the new extra harsh cycling laws – a little boy cycling along Rambla de Catalunya with a man who must have been in his 70s standing up on the basket rack behind him – Castellers style. I wish I’d got photos of both but I was too busy laughing.

Another Barcelona twist on the everyday, however, can be seen in the architecture. Often, when a building has been demolished a collage of leftover bathroom, kitchen and bedroom walls is left, forming an odd façade to the neighbouring block. I know you see this in other cities as well, but in Barcelona it really is part of the landscape – perhaps because of the rate of demolition going on. The Raval district, needless to say, is a veritable exhibition of it.

It can be funny (especially when sinks and shower heads are still attached) and sad, ugly and strangely beautiful all at the same time. There is apparently a word for the phenomenon in Catalan - but I'm still trying to find out what it is... if anyone knows, please tell me. There are also whole Flickr groups devoted to the phenomenon, although without knowing the name for it, I've only found a couple of images: here's one.

Designer shopping in BCN

Barcelona is great for shopping whatever you’re into, but if you like design or are a designer, two particular stores make it one of the best shopping cities in the world. I am happy because I got to visit both today.

The first is Servei Estacio. Particularly useful this morning because obscurely enough I needed some new legs for a bed, but as well as a huge selection of random furniture parts, it also sells pretty much everything else you might ever possibly need.

Here are some miniature “I Beams” that they sell by the metre:

And some of the hundreds of signage solutions:

Then I was told to stop taking pictures, but if that hadn’t happened I’d be posting (admittedly kind of blurred) images of the 50 different types of bubble wrap available, the rolls of Astroturf, the giant pipecleaners, the acrylic-in-any-shape-size-or-colour-you-can-imagine, the hammocks, confetti, cable, string, ribbons, lightbulbs, transfers, paint, and fake fur. Over five huge floors there is simply no equivalent to this store in the UK and you can’t leave without plans to start making things and buying all sorts of crazy shapes in polystyrene you’ll never know what to do with when you get them home.

The second king-of-shops is Vinçon.

If design boutiques can get a bit predictable in the UK (and they are always the same - the Flos lamps, Kartell chairs, Norman Copenhagen washingup bowls and Pantone mugs... enough!) then this is how it should be done. Vinçon – which has been going since 1973 – is where to come to find the stuff you can’t make even after a visit to Servei Estacio. It is beautifully laid out over two gigantic floors in a stunning historic building on Passeig de Gracia, and the low lighting and inspiring displays lure you in and keep you wandering around for hours.

Upstairs there’s also an exhibition of its famous limited edition carrier bags – which are always designed by a different designer, and often topical. The display is permanent by the way, so whenever you go you always have the excuse you are getting some culture in too. They've really thought of everything...

Let them eat cake

On Monday I had a lunch do with Ian Schrager. The hotelier, who is responsible for The Sanderson and St Martins Lane Hotel in London, as well as a host of incredible luxury retreats around the rest of the world, is currently drumming up a little publicity for the hotly anticipated 40 Bond concept in New York.

And yes please can we all go and live there? At around the $9m mark per condo (basic rate) it looks quite comfortable. The idea is that it combines all the benefits of home ownership with the services, privileges and amenities of a world class, five-star hotel. And there’s no more of the Starck-raving Alice and Wonderland themed proportion distortion that Schager hotels are known for either – Schrager ditched Philippe a couple of years ago. The building, designed by the eminently more sophisticated Herzog & de Meuron, is widely billed as “an architectural masterpiece”.

Shrager was charming and millionairish, as you’d expect. But one point he did bring up was surprising. He explained that some people are questioning the ethics of creating such architecture that will only be experienced by a very small, very wealthy minority. “But I believe that this building is so extraordinary that everyone who walks by it will be able to enjoy it,” he said. “And in that way this architecture will benefit everyone – even if it’s only the very wealthy who can actually stay in it.”

I don’t agree all good architecture should be public necessarily, but I do think Schrager would do better to stay quiet on that one – it’s a little too “Let them eat cake!” not to grate.

Mind you, I'm happy to investigate further – I could maybe stay in one of the residences and watch the public’s reactions to the architecture as they go passed… Hmmm – might have to pitch that.