A short introduction to O Street design studio followed by a chat through the process of developing the new design for the RBS polymer banknotes. Talking collaboration, co-design and midges, this will be a glimpse at the methods used by a modern design studio on one of those once-in-a-lifetime dream projects… Making Money!
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Product Turing Fest 2017
Making Money
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Thanks for interrupting your lunch break to join in the lunchtime session. My name is David Freer, and I'm a graphic designer. As a young, cool creative festival, I'm hoping you'll appreciate the style of my presentation. I'm going be showing you lots of images to tell a story.
And I'm going to apologize now in case any F bombs get dropped during it. Our design company is called O Street. Its main HQ is based in an old launderette in Glasgow. Three years ago we set up a satellite studio just outside London.
We're planning on opening a new shop in Colorado next year, And every summer, we go fishing in Loch Fyne. Both I and my business partner, Neil Wallace, had worked previously in big integrated ad agencies in London and the US and felt the time was right to try something a bit different.
So when we started O Street about ten years ago, the concept was to keep it small and keep it creative. We're very keen to prove that a small studio doesn't mean small work, however. And these days we have some great clients, including Spotify, Google, BrewDog, Deweyr's, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the Glasgow University Pole Dancing Club.
That's another talk, I'm afraid, but good one. Our work ranges from packaging to branding. From real books to e books. And the much plagiarised work that initially made our name, Toilet Signs for Jamie Oliver's Restaurants. There's loads of projects I could talk to you about.
I'm just going to flick through a few. But the one that most people like hearing about at the moment is our recent involvement in the redesign of the new RBS banknotes. Designing money is a dream job for a graphic designer, a project where the physical result will be in existence for at least thirty years.
Almost everyone in Scotland would have one of these in his or her pockets at some point. This is a photo of my dad. He carries ten of them around in his pocket every day just to show off what his son's company designed. Now much as we'd like to take sole credit for this job, one of the great things about the project is all the number of people that were involved in its development.
The people's money was an unprecedented design collaboration across Scotland. Jenny Lennox from Nile HQ ran the engagement phase and general coordination. There was a design advisory board that included the team at Graven Images, Timur Speesties, StuCo and the design team at RBS. There was a wider group of graphic design firms, photographers, poets, architects, even a few knitters.
But most importantly, the people of Scotland, who helped develop the themes and ideas that informed the concept we developed. The scale and importance of any banknotes in everyday life meant that getting the people to inform the design was key. Through a series of workshops across Scotland, we compiled a wealth of research on what should be in the new banknotes.
From this, we decimated the core concepts which would lead to the content in the note. The theme of natural colour and light was really important to a lot of people. The landscape of Scotland, from land to sea to sky. But people were also really tired of the cliches and wanted to celebrate the everyday things in life.
There needed to be humor and personality. And if we were going to showcase a portrait, it should be someone unexpected, somebody unsung and uncelebrated. No offense to the Queen. Now of course there was an immense amount of research behind this project. We looked at currencies all around the world, both real and not surreal.
RBS were prompted to introduce these notes as the Bank of England announced they were changing all their notes to polymer. This is a new plastic substrate which makes notes a lot more durable. Part of the reason RBS had to follow suit is pretty soon note hardware everywhere like ticket machines and so on are going to be designed to fit this new note style.
So RBS needed a note that fitted within certain amount of constraints. We researched old school typography in the Glasgow School of Art case room. We also looked at more indirect source material, like omnidirectional design of playing cards, or the looms of tweed weavers.
And given the content from the workshops, it was necessary to take plenty of Highland walks. Now looking at the main elements of the note here, we've got Shepard. Now a key part of our note design was the choice of the person in the note.
Each of the new banknotes will feature an unsung hero from Scottish culture. This is Nan Shepherd. Nan was unknown to a lot of people, and almost written out of official late twentieth century literary compendiums. Her quiet contemplation of Scottish landscapes and nature had recently been rediscovered by a new generation of Scots.
As soon as it was suggested, it felt like a natural choice. Now this is a delicate job. When the bank invests millions of pounds in printing a note, they need to make sure their choice of person is not contentious. There could be no whiff of scandal or controversy or crime.
We could not pick a living person because no matter how popular they are, their full story, life story is not unknown yet. We called this the Ralph Harris factor. But despite her squeaky clean rep, even Nan wasn't safe from the Daily Mail. Now the two quotes in the note are from Nan Shepard's book, The Living Mountain, which talk a lot about people's relationship with nature, primarily her relationship with the Cairngorm mountains.
The herringbone tweed pattern was commissioned especially for the note, and there's a different textile design for the ten, the twenty and the fifty. The photograph of the note is an isolated hollow in the Cairngorms, a place where sometimes the snow lasts all year.
It was taken by a mountain ranger specifically for this note. Now looking at the other side of the note, Each one of these notes is going to feature a pair of omnidirectionally positioned animals. The concepts for the design elements throughout the whole note series are a pair of animals on a textile background, a half woven tweed loom.
Each note will have a unique textile and the botanical that was traditionally used to dye that fabric. We knew from the workshops that no one was interested in stags or salmon. Only the working man's fish appeared in his first note. Now the botanical we chose was one called woad, which was traditionally used to make a blue dye.
I walked with my reason out beside the sea is an English translation of the line from the Gaelic poem The Choice by Sohrli MacLean. The visible line in the note is in Gaelic here, but the lucky shopkeeper is checking the note with a UV lamp will see an English translation written underneath it.
The line from Sorley is written in a calligraphic hand called Scottish Secretarial, which at one point was unique to businesses here. Basically it was like the Comic Sans of eighteenth century Scotland. Even though it was a massive collaboration, people's money worked a lot like most of our jobs.
There was research, sketching, designing, on the screen, and production. We went through a couple of creative concepts. This is one of the first ones that got rejected. A vertical series of notes that went from real life sea locations to mountain locations. We're big fans of sketching or scamping to quickly see how elements of our design work together.
We experimented a lot with the window, how we would use that, and also how we could make this half formed tweed loom work with the botanical in the background. And as things progressed, we upped the quality of the drafting. As type geeks in O Street, we got work drawing custom numerals for the note.
This is a modern serif font inspired by old school types seen in Scotland, but updated for the modern age. We also had to gather content from the notes from many Scottish creative collaborators. There's a funny story behind this fish. Long time O Street collaborator Stuart Cair did the final mackerel illustration for us.
For provenance's sake, we wanted to make sure it was a genuine Scottish mackerel, so he went out and bought a mackerel from his local fishmonger. The only problem is that Stuart was extremely allergic to fish, so the drawing had to be done with gloves on from a safe distance with his assistant doing all the fish handling.
We also sourced a great photograph of the star, an eccentric portrait taken when she was young. We found out that the headband on her head, far from being a sign of vanity, was Nan messing around in the photographer's studio wrapping camera film around her head.
We worked with Scottish textile designer Donna Wilson. A master of colour, she developed a palette that was in step with the Bank of England notes, but had enough uniqueness to make it feel different. Once the concept was agreed and all the elements created and gathered, it was time to take things digital and build the notes for the specialty printers.
And here's the finished product. To print this note, we worked with a famous security printer called Delarue. For obvious reasons, have to be careful how much I can share with you here. They have airport style security in their offices at Delarue, and all personal belongings and technology needs to be left in a little locker before you go on a meeting.
I got stopped for a random search one morning, but thankfully they stopped short of the rubber gloves. There are many print processes and features built into this note for security reasons, so it's hard for people to copy basically. Over eighteen processes in total.
These included the window, the gravier printing, which is the white substrate that gets etched on the window. There's holographic sparks or foils used for the RBS logo. There's intaglio, which is the raised bumpy ink you see in a lot of notes, which is actually a crust of dry ink around an ink core that stays liquid on that note for years.
Apparently the best security test for the old fifty pound note used to be if you gut the fifty pound note and smear it on a piece of paper, if it leaves a red smear on it, then it means it's a real note. There's micropatterns, intricate details that make up the tones in the background.
Everyone's favorite feature, however, seemed to be the UV, the invisible UV detail that only appears when you shine black light onto the note. Some of my favorite bits here are the go back here. If you look in the top right of the screen there, a little midge which is hidden in every note.
And it's going to be in the ten, the twenty, and the fifty. If you look inside the mackerel's eye there, closer you'll see there's a five digit. It's probably too far for you to see, but all the texture made in the background is made from miniature fives written in a micro detail.
Now we worked with Delarue and their engravers and pattern makers to develop a version of the note that was based on our design, yet included all these security processes and details. With the note so full of narrative and intricacy, we wanted a place to share these stories with the wider public.
The bank chose to create an augmented reality app on Blipper that introduced people to the note. We created an AR overlay that revealed hotspots in the note, each showing specific details. As this is a tech conference, you all probably understand the opportunities, but also the problems with current AR technology.
The blipper we created looked wonderful, and I'm still amazed when I hover my viewfinder over a five pound note and the three d animation pops up. Sadly, however, the engagement wasn't as high as we would have liked. If I could do it again, I'd have chosen a method of introducing a note in a manner more accessible, like a browser page.
Which is handy because that's exactly what we are doing now for the imminent launch of the new RBS ten pound note happening in Edinburgh later this month. Much as I'd like to share that story with you now for security reasons, I'm going to have to save it for next year's festival.
That's the end of my talk, folks. Thank you very much. I'm a bit quick on time, so you probably want to go for lunch. If anybody has any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them. Informally. Oh, there we go. Thank you. It's a good question.
Do we design them all at the same time? So the main note series is a five or a ten or a twenty and a fifty in the UK. They're not going to go into mass production of the one hundred. Now, we did design the concept for how all of these notes would work together initially.
But the detail is more in that sketch format that we showed you, so that they would work together as a body. And we're working on another project with another bank at the moment. It's a really good way of doing it. So yeah, we kind of do.
No problem. It's an interesting one. So do we have any advice for a small company being able to work with these big agencies? I mean, think when I worked at a big ad agency in London for years, I kind of wrote about ten, fifteen years ago, and I realized that the trend what was happening was there was always a small core team of creatives that were actually delivering the core value and loads of middlemen in between.
Now this isn't always the case, but for certain jobs I recognize there's an opportunity with a more boutique approach, which is the kind of trendy word for it these days. So smaller studios being able to work for big ones. And I remember at the time when I was in the big agency, Virgin Atlantic actually had a policy of only using small studios.
And that was partly because of security. So they realized that BA weren't necessarily going have spies in a small agency, and those small agencies might work a little bit harder. So what I think has happened is there's been a sea change in the agency side, on the client side, where they're willing to work with smaller studios if they can see that those smaller studios can deliver the value.
It's tough work, but if you can prove you can do it, and it's a lot cheaper for them to do most of the time because there's no middlemen, then I think the opportunity is there for small companies. Does that help? Hi. Yes. It's not just my dad that carries them around in his pocket.
Busted. What's that? Oh, there we go. Did we keep a keepsake of the there's a few drafts of drawings that we have, but the whole world of money and people that collect coins and notes, these things are highly prized possessions. The original drawings, even some of the scamps, are all actually in the archives at the Royal Bank of Scotland, and they do own them.
That was something we had to sign up to at the So we might have snuck a few of the kind of secondary drawings out there, yeah. But on the whole, they have all the key material that they need to keep in their archives.
Yeah. Good. Okay, great. Well, you very much.