November 5th, 2011

the g of the bang

Back in nineteen-seventy-when? a young me wrote to the Astra Fireworks Company for some samples of their firework labels – the examples here are from the collectionette I received by return. Within a few years, the postwar explosion of richly decorated British firework packaging had suddenly fizzled out and most firework production had reverted to its original source, China.

Now our fireworks are designed to appeal to the Michael Bay generation, named ‘Street Legal’,  ‘Air Strike’, ‘Big Bad Dangerez’ (whatever that means) and so on, their packaging fit only to be viewed in the dark. UK ‘Bonfire Night’ never went away but got transformed into two weeks of shock & awe nervously monitored by the Noise Abatement and Dead Pets’ Societies. Thanks to Health & Safety we must now ‘stand well back and be well amazed’. As if looking at the TV, watching Baghdad burn.

Remember Remember is a wonderful exhibition in conjunction with The Museum of British Folklore at stately Warwickshire art gallery Compton Verney (past events include The Tulse Luper Suitcases) that vividly reminded me of what we have lost. Revisiting fire festivals going back centuries, the exhibition also focuses in delightful detail on post-war packaging & presentation of fireworks in Britain. Names like ‘Martian Ray’, ‘Barrel of Imps’ and ‘Mine of Serpents’ evoke a more innocent time. Simple designs, largely by semi-skilled employees rather than designers, printed in limited colour have all the character, wit and fun of what used to be a thrilling, intimate and accessible celebration of darkness, fire & sausage rolls.

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September 8th, 2011

escape velocity

An awful lot of very good graphic designers celebrate their success in the profession by leaving it. Is this because they cannot wait to get away from design? Surely not…

A recent blog post by Steven Heller concerned one Kent Hunter, a gifted designer I met briefly in the 80s whilst working for a transatlantic corporate graphics concern. Kent is a very talented chap indeed who amongst other things I remember art directed some ground-breaking annual report work for Time-Warner. Having had a very successful career with Franfurt Balkind, Kent and his partner have now opened an antique store in Millerton, NY.

Around the same time, in our London office Suzi Godson was a highly talented, clear-thinking designer I enjoyed working with. She bailed out of a very promising design career to become a successful Author and Times Columnist.

John Larkin was co-founder (with Tim May) of Design House Consultants, which was (and still is as far as I know) a very successful business, although John has long since departed both design and the UK to St Tropez for a new life as a hotelier.

There are plenty of other and higher-profile Poachers-turned-Gamekeeper: For Ben Schott (of Original Miscellany fame) and Dave Eggers (of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, McSweeney’s and-much-more fame), graphic design activity was just step on the road to greater things.

What makes these escapees so keen to leave design? A desperate desire to never work for the man again? (understandable); a fundamental hatred of hard work? (not likely); A sudden need to assume a new identity for tax purposes? (possibly)…

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July 26th, 2011

hail to the Info Tsar

 

 

Having lately spent far more time than I care to in and around NHS facilities it is hard avoid noticing how much energy / resources are wasted when information is badly managed. I am no systems analyst, but even without an abacus for a mind the potential benefits of sorting out information in the NHS seem clear in three areas:

In some trusts, budgetary adjustments have reduced willingness to create / maintain good patient communications. Visits to dreary GP surgeries are not elevated by leaflet / poster displays that climb the walls like mutant strains of rising damp. Clip art and Comic Sans feature heavily in DIY print productions in which clarity and communication have taken a back seat. Patients should have the right to clear information in support of their treatment.

Physically navigating the NHS, its hospitals, clinics and other facilities can be complex. Some of the larger hospitals have decently planned sign systems and an air of calm efficiency as a result, but many smaller or regional ones do not, and those that are building / reorganizing often fail to consider users by properly re-routing them. How many late / missed appointments are caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Exceptional facilities like the Kentish Town Integrated Care Centre seem to be from another world entirely. Owing its existence to an opportunity of history, the persistent vision of an individual and a gifted design team, such a paragon is unlikely to ever be anything like the norm, in this universe at least.

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May 19th, 2011

gimme a break

That nice Professor Cox was on TV recently (atop some picturesque mountain, waving around the Hubble’s holiday snaps) banging on about space-time being a Woonder o’ t’ Universe™. That’s true enough but down here in office/studio space, time and/or space are scarcer – time to reflect in particular. What with lunch being for wimps and none of us having an attention span any more, non-essential reflection has become so widely discouraged that it’s a woonder the world is not full of humans behaving like headless chickens plunging civilisation headlong into chaos. Oh, hang on a minute…

It’s all too easy for busy designers to get burned out, stuck in a rut, demotivated or disillusioned with a profession that will always consume more mental energy than is strictly available (that probably contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics but I’m no Prof. Cox). To be the best designer you can be requires the cultivation of a continually positive and optimistic outlook. A tangible sense of possibility is required to fruitfully inhabit the mental zone where problems get solved and ideas get off the ground. Pressure directs us away from that zone like never before. For many an old fart like myself starting out decades ago in boom times, the urgent need to eat and provide a roof over one’s head was never more than a faint rumour. Now it looms intimidatingly large over one and all, and sustainable creativity is under threat like never before.

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April 4th, 2011

coloured up

Photo: Bernard Gagnon

Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?

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February 4th, 2011

apophenia: it’s what we do

Photo: Damon Easley

Most designers prefer visual to verbal communication and often do a poor job of explaining the profession to outsiders, some of whom may have an inkling that problem-solving is involved, but most of whom cling limpet-like to the idea that design is about ‘making things look nice’. If only there were a handy phrase to describe what really goes on… I have just discovered (thank you BBC Radio 4) that there is a name for what is probably the key design aptitude.

In 1958 neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined apophenia to describe “the unmotivated seeing of connections” with a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”. Finding connections and meanings in experience – is that not the most interesting/valuable part of what designers do?

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January 31st, 2011

what Captain Beefheart taught me about design

Feather Times a Feather, 1987

Last month the musician/artist variously known as Don Vliet/Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart died after a long battle with MS. Much will have been written about his influence by now, but I doubt that his wilfully eccentric music, abstract poetry and visual works are too frequently cited as inspirational by many designers (over-rational control-freaks that we tend to be) but… they worked for me.

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January 27th, 2011

eye-snacks from archive corner

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December 29th, 2010

quality time

Satisfaction is an uncommon commodity. In the context of work and in tough times, its scarcity and value rises like that of gold—the accumulation of which for some is satisfaction. Designers cannot rely on generous material reward for their labours—with each project unique, there are few easy profits or economies of scale. Wealthy designers have usually arrived there via success in ‘business’ rather than designing alone. But we are pretty fortunate in other benefits that design activity can bring. Designers can often see, if not always touch, the results of their labour and although these might have limited life, their physical existence—and on occasion, their effect on others—produces fleeting glows of satisfaction. Good design also demands a healthy interest in the world that many professions and modern lifestyles discourage.

I recently re-read a book (remember those?) which I had all but forgotten since my late teens: Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is not really about Zen, Art or keeping your Motoguzzi on the road. It is an odd piece of 70s autobiographical post-hippy-lit combining road trip, father-son relationship, nervous breakdown and fairly heavy (man) philosophical enquiry. It takes its time to get going, makes your head hurt here & there and although it does eventually offer some (unsettling) drama, a reprint is unlikely to give Dan Brown sleepless nights. Written at least 15 years before the the first personal computer, some of the language of this book is of its time (the word “groovy” appears at least twice without irony) but the relevance of its central theme—our relationship with technology—has increased a hundredfold.

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October 26th, 2010

book review: Marian Bantjes’ ‘I Wonder’

 

I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.

For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.

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