Poor Wac Mon, it’s difficult living with such a famous brother.

Show him you care and buy his t-shirt (lovingly created by Airside’s Chris Rain).

Huzzah! We have popped the Champagne at Airside towers as Fiat eco:Drive and Nokia viNe have both been awarded ‘best-in-book’ status by Creative Review for their 2009 edition of The Annual.

The Fiat eco:Drive project was created by the agency AKQA who asked Airside to design and animate the characters of Merv, Mini-Merv and Franco and produce an information film introducing the concept of eco:Drive, to be shown at motorshows. Such was the film’s popularity that Fiat commissioned us to produce three further films that expanded the wider eco:Drive world and explained how the software would work. The resulting imagery, characters and overall look designed by Airside became the heart of Fiat eco:Drive’s branding and is used throughout all media and eco:Drive application itself.

Similarly R/GA asked Airside to co-write, direct, design, animate and score a short film explaining how Nokia’s new viNe technology worked. R/GA gave Airside a lot of freedom to explain quite an abstract concept in an interesting and humorous way and it’s been great to see the fruits of our labours recognised in this year’s The Annual.

As a bonus feature, Creative Review also covered the publication of our monograph Airside by Airside, buy it here or read the exclusive interview with Airside’s very own Fred Deakin here on Creative Review’s blog.

Three cheers!

Introduction

In May 2008 Airside turned 10. As we approached our decade of design it was suggested to us that we should put out a book to celebrate. The initial idea was to produce a small booklet. So how did that turn into the 296-page, 2kg behemoth that is adorning the most fashionable coffee tables right now?

This is that story. It’s supposed to be a 500-word blog, but given what happened with the book, let’s see where we end up.

Interviews and commentary in the book are by Fiona Sibley.

Booklet To Book

Our agent in Japan was very keen on the idea of an Airside book and predicted that our large Japanese fan base would be overjoyed to have access to the narrative in their native tongue, and so the decision was made to tell the story in both English and Japanese. Immediately we realised a small booklet would not cope with a dual text format. For that we needed whopping great big pages, which served the additional function of showing off the work.

Having decided on a larger page size, Chris designed a grid based on an 80-page book that met the team’s general approval. As Fred said “it was a slam-dunk from the off”. With all the style and content changes to come, the flexibility of this grid would prove to be invaluable.

What’s The Story

Meanwhile we started considering what story we needed to tell and how it should be told. We reached the conclusion that the unvarnished story of Airside’s evolution, warts and all, was an interesting one and complemented the visual work perfectly. Inspired by a Mojo magazine feature on the history of punk, we decided the narrative should be presented in interview form with each participant chronicling their version of events and the interviews divided and arranged chronologically to tell the story from the group’s perspective.

Various other specific subject matters warranted their own chapter, such as the Airside Aesthetic and the Lemon Jelly project, and so a structure was put in place whereby every odd-numbered chapter told the story of Airside’s growth, while the four intervening chapters covered other topics, like the Airside Process or Self-Initiated Work.

On occasion we also needed a structural divide between the story and the work. While the text would naturally be illustrated with relevant examples of work, we also wanted certain pieces of work to have their own pages. So we introduced the double-page hero spreads, designed to show off those projects that were of great significance to Airside.

It soon became very clear that what we were planning would never squeeze into 80 compact pages. As Roy Schneider might have put it, we were gonna need a bigger book.

True Grid

Our smart, considered, well turned out grid suddenly found itself facing a rampaging hoard of contrary content. What’s a grid to do? Simply stiffen its upper lip and show how resolve can lead to greater flexibility. A number of tweaks later and we now had a layout that could cope with a varying number of pages, deal with large scale images and adapt sufficiently so we could alter the pace and tone of a now quite lengthy book simply by changing the look of a page.

With the grid in place, we started to think about the general style. One of the most important factors was to give the impression that the layout wasn’t necessarily designed by Airside. We wanted it to have a grown-up, quite straight feel that people wouldn’t immediately associate with us, leaving our personality to be expressed more directly through the work itself.

Deciding on the typeface was crucial. We wanted something that wasn’t too obvious and too Airside but would still suit the tone of the book. We eventually went for Bodoni Poster for the headings, which Fred describes as “classy, but in your face – a bit like Airside”. The bold serifs and formal feel felt like a radical departure for us. The contemporary workhorse Akkurat was chosen for the body text and together the two typefaces struck a unique and pleasing balance.

Finally we were ready to layout the prototype chapters and happily it all pretty much worked. The grid was adaptable and the pages were big enough to show off the work. Now down to the nitty-gritty.

Hairline Fracture

As the narrative is told in sequential interview format we had no clear way of introducing new people before their monologues began. We toyed with the idea of having a sidebar that could carry profiles of these clients and collaborators before deciding that the context of the text itself should be enough. The exception was for Airsiders who are introduced by having their name printed in a unique colour, which matches the one used on their business card.

These little touches were important as we wanted the text to feature details that you wouldn’t get in any other book. For example, each paragraph is indented and Chris came up with the device of filling the indented space with a hairline. This controversial move was widely debated. At one point we got the fear and took them all out, before deciding originality was what we were about and had to endure the pain-staking process of putting all them back in again for our sins.

Jap-lish

The next problem was how to present the English and Japanese text on the same page in a clear fashion that awarded equal billing to both languages.

The solution was inspired by an old Situationist fanzine called Semiotexte, which would often run two narratives on one page.

Our flexible grid meant the English and Japanese text could be at opposite ends of the page or sit beside each other depending on the requirements of the page. It helped that the two languages are so different that it’s hard to confuse the two. We also liked how this fluid presentation of the book’s bilingual text references how both Western and Japanese cultures often use each other’s language as a stylistic design element.

Of course this bi-lingual jiggery-pokery could have been well nigh on impossible, were it not for the seamless work of our intern Yoshi who prepared all the Japanese text and implemented the design template throughout with ruthless efficiency. He also makes a damn fine cup of coffee.

Photography

After attempting to cobble together a selection of images from our photographic archive it became very clear that in order to give the book the visual clarity and excellence it demanded, our entire back catalogue would have to be re-photographed specifically for this project. Anne and Jamie undertook this mighty labour with grace and enthusiasm and created a specific photographic aesthetic that gives the work the room to breath perfectly.

A mountain of clearance issues then had to be navigated as in many instances of past collaborations with clients we were not the sole copyright holders of the work in question. It was gratifying to discover how many clients were only too happy to be featured in our humble tome, and in many cases they were also happy to contribute to the text, taking the narrative out of the studio and into the wider world.

Cover Versions

The one thing we knew about the cover was that it would follow the tradition of Lemon Jelly’s record sleeves, so naturally one of Fred’s rhythmic, abstract patterns fitted the bill. It was the last consensus on the cover we had for a while.

Fred’s chaotic, lurid first design was hated by nearly everyone. Except Fred of course who thought it was damn good. (And I still do! – FD) Tweaking the pattern didn’t work, changing the colours didn’t work, nothing worked until Fred fired everyone adapted the design for the book’s end papers.

We decided the end papers should be a very traditional, one-colour design (just like the Tintin books and many others) and the obvious contender was a repetition of the cover design, so Fred reworked it accordingly. Suddenly in the harsh light of monochrome, everyone began to see potential in the pattern. Reducing the scale of the circles made it more attractive and colours were reintroduced but more muted than before.

Finally there was a consensus and it was time to mess around with it.

The cover looks like a simple pattern but in fact there is no repetition at all. The trick is to establish a rigid set of rules (in this case you have eight different types of semi-circle, lines of equal distance apart and a grid pattern) and then see where you can introduce variety. On the front cover the semi-circles opposing each other are different colours, on the back they are mostly the same.

This echoes the lemonjelly.ky sleeve design where the blobs on each panel of the foldout cover are heading in two different directions, but these directions are different on each panel.

This subtle contrast is also a way of differentiating between the front and back of a book with no type on the cover. Like the Lemon Jelly records and Fred’s Triptych and NuBalearica mix albums, the book has no text on the outside. The idea is to create something mysterious that draws the reader in, so they think, “what could this possibly be?” and are drawn to explore it.

However this theory was not one that our distributors, publishers Die Gestalten Verlag, initially agreed with, feeling that the lack of type on the cover might compromise sales. Convincing them otherwise was a difficult task but eventually we plied them with Lemon Jelly CD sales figures and design awards and they relented.

Besides, we knew we’d have to make concessions to the retailers who would need some kind of promotional blurb on the cover, let alone a bar code. Like all Lemon Jelly releases we designed a sticker with all the relevant information that would go on the book’s protective shrink-wrap, which could be discarded once the customer had bought the book. Of course now we quite like the sticker and have some regrets about not incorporating it onto the book itself. Maybe the second print run will be different!

Finally Die Gestalten Verlag on seeing the final design insisted that we brighten up the colours a tad, and in hindsight they were quite right to do so as the original was far too dull. The power of collaboration and compromise!

Airside By Airside

Nine months, ten cases of RSI, 19 nervous breakdowns and one great collective effort later we sent that book off to print never caring if we ever saw it again.

Until we did see it again in all its 296-page, 2kg, full-colour glory.

Then like a mother with a newborn babe in her arms, all the labour pains melted away into exhausted sighs of pride and joy.

Our book. Enjoy.

Today’s delivery to the studio, fresh from Japan, was Rie fu’s new album Urban Romantic. Designed by Airside, Urban Romantic is the culmination of our work on Rie fu’s previous single releases, which can be seen here as part of our newly updated website.

Before photographing the album for our archives, we thought we’d post a few snapshots to wet your appetite. For the talent scouts among you, our hand model was our very own studio manager, Natalie Wisdom.

Those in the know would have heard that Airside’s title sequences for the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is up for one of the industry’s top prizes – an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or a BAFTA if you prefer!

For those not in the know, I can let you know that we are still up for a BAFTA award. The results to be announced in May, so we are keeping our fingers crossed. Will the Ladies be partying with a certain Mr. Rourke? Only time (and maybe a bribe) will tell…