Toy story

I don’t often get to Ikea - a car being a prerequisite for visiting most of them. Or it’s a tortuous walk down the edge of the motorway. Or a train, then a bus, then humping a yellow bag all the way back again. Living in London, it is a wonder they haven’t cottoned on to the idea of Ikea Metro stores yet.

The whole Ikea thing fascinates me when I do get to one. The route planning taking you through room set after room set. The paper rulers. The café with vibrant green cakes. The meatballs. The shortcuts through to the marketplace..

This glorious ode to call it design, pile it high, sell it cheap is always rather smarter than I expect. In-store graphics are pretty darn tasteful. The product designs on sale nice and simple - for the most part. Although it doesn’t do to get too close to a lot of it. And some of the food packaging is really very well designed.

The fact that everyone seems to know how Ikea is ‘done’ is also interesting to me. Uncomplainingly, shoppers do all the work for the store. There isn’t much help to be had. You choose, find, hump your own flat pack furniture to the tills. And then load up the car, take it home, unpack and make it up yourself. Job done. By you.

This weekend the leftover toys from Christmas were everywhere. Tugging at the hearts of children bored of room after room of suburban-style Scandi. Surreal shelves piled high with furry polar bears, kangaroos, crocodiles, elephants, rats. Some lonely decimated shelves, with one or two unwanted fur things on them. It was like toy road kill in there.

Just dandy

This week seems to be about well-dressed men. I have a weakness for them.

I finally got around to reading a big thick tasty biography of Beau Brummell. Considered Head Dandy of his Georgian generation and many subsequent generations. It’s turning out to be a fine read. Unashamed obsession and manipulation of clothing to social and political ends.

And one of my blog feeds – Happy Mundane – just brought me to a Prada film ‘First Spring’ put together for their Spring 2010 Menswear collection. It is a very beautiful 9 black and white, evocative minutes. Slightly strange. It is also, unsurprisingly, like one long photograph from a fashion campaign. I have always liked arty film shorts, though. This one just has some very well dressed models and great Shanghai scenery to make it more of a treat to the eye.

It was commissioned from Chinese artist Yang Fudong. You can smell the money they must have spent on this. But then Prada have the money to spend and fancy themselves as art collectors and curators, as well as designers.

Overtly commercial undertakings like this obviously find it hard to be considered ‘proper art’ by the cognoscenti. But I’m so well ensconced in all things fashion history that I don’t question much. Worry less. And just enjoy the sight of a well turned-up trouser and a sharp sloping shoulder line.

Tag it

I am someone more excited by the wrapping than the contents. Paper things: bags, labels, small catalogues, fold-out promo cards. And, glory of glories, hang tags.

Hang tags often have a hole punched thorough them (eyeletting), a string attached to them and a little bit of information printed on them. Or perhaps a logo. It’s a good and satisfying combination, makes a lovely object. The ephemeral nature of the things makes them even lovelier. Does this pleasure in small things make me a cheap date? I fear so.

In Heal’s in Manchester at New Year I was cooing over the Orla Kiely products. She has designed a set of furniture, bed wear, towels and other bits for them. It’s not revolutionary stuff; drawing heavily on 1950s and 1960s Scandinavian designs and the paler Ercol designs so collectable now. And why not? But despite that it is covetable. Useable. Understated. Tasteful.

This hang tag was attached by a nice small brass safety pin to a face flannel. There isn’t enough thought about this level of retail detail in my opinion. It really makes the offer so much nicer. Of course, I thought the hang tag much nicer than the actual flannel.

Kiely designs handbags too. They are a sort of right of passage for many of my friends. Ideal for the woman who has grown out of Accessorize and Top Shop but can’t yet afford a Gucci, Chanel or Hermes. They are well made, distinctive, big enough for keeping all that stuff in. Just different enough.

The nose for it

A final post before 2010.

This Pinocchio pencil came to me as part of a birthday present in early December. He came with a paper bird that I had previously seen and panted after. It was lovely to be given things so me. Both items are on the shelf now. But with his red topper and slightly unhappy face Pinocchio somehow gives out an appropriate Christmas message.

The rise of the individual and small-ish online craft shops (like the one that offered up my pencil) is really interesting to me. There are big online marketplaces like Folksy and the bigger Etsy - with a sometimes questionable definition of ‘craft’. But I really prefer the small curated crafty websites. You get a real sense of someone making things and choosing things they would like to buy themselves. These websites are often glorified personal blogs. Giving you information on the person, postings about new items in the ‘shop’, photographs of the owners homes and their friends, pets, socks…

My Google Reader currently follows 54 different blogs. Although I am fickle and many come and go. But they are ideal snippets for me - a picture, a bit of text, something to coo over momentarily, or something to tempt my credit card out into the open.

A lot of the blogs I follow come from individuals that make and or sell stuff. They might have a small shop in Belgium, a tastefully cluttered desk in a cold Nordic-type outpost or a clunky private press in a small, smoky US city. It seems to me to be a particularly female thing - the selling of small items, lovingly chosen, presented and packaged. Money is not necessarily the motivating factor. The numbers of items involved is not going to make anyone really rich, really quick.

It is more about stepping outside the usual, the mainstream. About spending your day or part of your day with, just, well, nice things.

Taking the tickle out

The cold weather is making me think of thermal underwear. It’s probably an age thing too. But that in turn made me think of a lovely Morley Pure Wool Theta Shrunk leaflet I have.

I particularly love this illustration of a relaxed gent, in his socks and suspenders, smoking a cigar, wearing his ‘soft wool’ all-in-one, already rid of all ‘natural irritants.’ Important, I think. One wouldn’t want him to feel itchy and scratchy on certain delicate parts of the body.

The leaflet was issued during World War II. It extols the virtues of wool that won’t shrink and has had ‘the tickle taken out of it.’ The British Army, we are told, were issued with the garments; ‘and the Air Force quickly followed suit.’

All in all: ‘Something exciting has happened to wool.’

The succinct illustrations are by ‘Fenwick’ - I can’t find anything about him / her. Very much in the style of Fougasse, who illustrated a lot of war time print and advertising work.

Thermal-ness, keeping warm and practicality are definitely an age thing as far as underwear is concerned these days. Those models writhing in the Calvin Klein adverts really don’t look bothered about the temperature.

More or less

I had a trip to the Design Museum to see the Dieter Rams exhibition this weekend.

I met Dieter when I worked at Vitsoe, who manufacture his 606 shelving system. He was charming, had a twinkle in his eye and a pencil in his hand. I remember him crawling under a compressed table to check a tiny detail. I remember feeling a little star struck.

This exhibition is all about the details. Design unadorned and understated. Rams’ back catalogue looks pretty modern to my eye. Lots of classic shapes I remember from my childhood, when his Braun products were ubiquitous and bought in Boots electrical department.

Apart from the 606 shelves I find his furniture a bit dated and easily datable, though. It’s not for me. Yet his products are the bees knees.

The exhibition design and graphics by Bibliothèque are really well delivered. Just enough and not too much intervention. Their design compliments the objects on show but doesn’t overwhelm them. Nicely judged object layouts, great oversized graphic treatments and a sense of peacefulness that allows the objects to be just, well, seen.

It is rare to see exhibitions these days where designers have been able to resist shouting louder than the exhibits. Case in point: the Identity exhibition at the Wellcome Trust, which I also saw at the weekend. Designed by Ben Kelly, it is a wall of unfriendly wood and green metal. There is no graphic signage to indicate where you are, what the narrative or user journey is. All you can see, everywhere, is the overwhelming structure. Oh, and slightly embarrassed people wandering around looking for the actual exhibition.

Milk it

For me a visit to the supermarket is a distraction of packaging. I go off-list very quickly indeed if something is designed nicely and needs to go home with me.

For example, I very often feel the need for a whole set of Waitrose herbs and spices. They look great all lined up in the shop, nice big lettering, simple clear containers, interesting innards. The other day I spent a long time looking at the cake decorations and bun cases in there, similarly packaged but brighter on the inside. And I don’t bake.

Tea packaging is a big like too. Nice little rows of cardboard boxes with illustrations on them. Inside, disappointingly, you often find rather unnatural flavoured natural herb teas. Top opening tea packets with hinges are the best. I can take or leave a cellophane wrap.

Marks & Spencers tend to have small clusters of nicely packaged goods in their shops. Amongst horrible, vivid fast food wrappers and ye-olde looking boxes and bottles for the grey shoppers you can find some gems. They have some corking sweet packets in store at the moment. This small ‘milk carton’ fairly leapt out at me the other day. Fabulous typeface. Lovely visual play on the packaging of real milk. Nice milky milk sweets inside. Bliss.

Milk is a wonderful thing anyway. As a word it looks great. It's a nice colour – full cream, anyway. Milk bottles used to be nice - those old glass ones were a classic shape. Pushing in the tin foil lid was most satisfying. Such a simple packaging solution. The cardboard milk carton is a classic now too. Up there with - dare I say it - Chinese cardboard takeaway pots with little metal carrying handles. But that's a whole other blog.