Developing Ideas 01: People

Using reference from photographs and sketchbooks I started to draw. Initially I focused on the social interaction on which Spanish communities are built, working quickly in an attempt to capture the energy I had observed in markets and shops. (click images to enlarge)

Emory Douglas

 “As minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas visualised the party’s ideology and used art to educate and inspire people to action. Douglas art is part of a long tradition of activist protest graphics. His critiques of racism, inequality, capitalism, and imperialism are still relevant. In forty years since Emory’s first appeared, racism poverty, and illegal wars continue, and his art remains a powerful weapon against social injustice.” Carol A Wells, Centre for the Study of political Graphics, Los Angeles.

Douglas created images of a way of life that had very little visual record at that time and I imagine that seeing a graphic image of themselves in print must have been extremely empowering for the children of the ghetto in the late nineteen sixties.

Eric Ravilious HIGH STREET

In 1938 Ravilious created a set of 24 autolithographs of shops, which were found on the British High Street of that time, for Country Life books. These prints formed a book for children printed by the Curwen Press. Unfortunately, only 2000 books were printed because it’s printing plates were destroyed during the blitz but as a result High St has become one of the most highly sought after artists books of the time. For me it’s value lies in the intimate record it makes of a world that no longer exists. Drawings of everyday things communicate the detail of social history in a really unique way. Artists are often not concerned with the mundane and ordinary and as a result he work of those that do enables a special resonance.  

Why COMPRA? 01

On my return from Galicia, I started to realize that I had to do something with all the material I had generated. Thoughts around the importance of buying and selling, the damage of consumerism, the social significance of small owner occupied businesses and need to preserve the visual diversity of the High Street began to crystallize into an argument that I felt needed to be made. The question was how to make it? I have always believed that to draw something you need to respect it. This is different to taking a photograph, you spend more time with your subject and as a result somehow the act imparts value to it. With this in mind I looked at the work of Emory Douglas and Eric Ravilious. Two very different artists working with very different subject matter, but both managed to produce images that force us to respect this subject matter.  

Some quotes from Michael Beirut

Three quotes from ‘79 Short Essays on Design’ by the brilliant Michael Beirut express in greater detail what I was saying in my recent 'Anti Branding?' post about designers needing to respect content and context:

From 'Warning May Contain Non Design Content'

Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I've become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. I believe I'm still passionate about graphic design. But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.

In that spirit, I like to think that Design Observer is a place for people to read and talk about graphic design. But I also like to think that it's a place where someone might accidentally discover some other things, things that seem to have nothing to do with design: Ethiopian grave markers, Passover tales, 50-year-old experimental novels, cold war diplomacy. Hell, I wouldn't even mind a post on Betty Boop.

Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.

From 'Why Designers Can't Think'

The pioneering design work of the 1940s and 1950s continues to interest and excite us while work from the intervening years looks more and more dated and irrelevant. Without the benefit of intensive specialized programs, the pioneers of our profession, by necessity, became well-rounded intellectually. Their work draws its power from deep in the culture of their times.

Modern design education, on the other hand, is essentially value-free: every problem has a purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context. Some of the most tragic victims of this attitude hail not from the world of high culture, but from the low. Witness the case of a soft-drink manufacturer that pays a respected design firm a lot of money to “update” a classic logo. The product of American design education responds: “Clean up an old logo? You bet,” and goes right to it. In a vacuum that excludes popular as well as high culture, the meaning of the mark in its culture is disregarded. Why not just say no? The option isn’t considered.

Our clients usually are not other designers; they sell real estate, cure cancer, make forklift trucks. Nor are there many designers in the audiences our work eventually finds. They must be touched with communication that is genuinely resonant, not self-referential. To find the language for that, one must look beyond Manfred Maier’s Principles of Design or the last Communication Arts Design Annual.

Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves

From a 'World in Two Footnotes'

(Nick) Bell has a prescription: "It's quite simple, it's been said before and so many times that it has become a cliché. And that is to design from the inside outwards." He is talking specifically about designing for cultural institutions, but the advice is universal. "The practice of corporate identity design" -- and here I would add graphic design in general — "must be inextricably tied to the content it is supposedly serving; make content the issue and resist making design the issue."

I have never met a designer who would deny the importance of content. Yet "making content the issue" takes real humility and self-effacement, qualities that are sometimes in short supply in the ego-driven world of creative production. Designers are more often tempted to serve more urgently demanding gods: their clients on one hand, their inner muses on the other. What the world demands, however, is something more. Call it content, call it substance, call it meaning: it is the too-often-forgotten heart of what we do. It is the way out of the binary world that Nick Bell describes so well. It is the third choice. Choose content.

Guy Debord

Guy Debord says everything else I could say about the riots far better. He wrote this after the Watts riots in 1965.

“The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity, against the world of commodities and of worker consumers hierarchically subordinated to the measuring rod of the commodity. The blacks of Los Angeles.. take modern capitalist propaganda, with all it’s touting affluence at it’s word. They want all the objects displayed, and available in the abstract, right now- because they want to use them.”
The ‘Rise & Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy’ 

Guy DeBord (translated by Donald Nicholson Smith)

My understanding of this quote is that if you create a culture that imparts status only through material possessions, then at some stage, the people who do not have these possessions and have no way of getting them, will take them by force. This principle seems very relevant in Hackney on the 9^th August of 2011.

The London Riots

Last night the city outside my front door went up in flames. There are many things I could say about this, but this blog isn’t a space for my ranting. A re-occurring theme from my travels in Spain is the importance of shops, businesses and how the act of transaction can create connection within a community. A feature of the culture of shops and cafes in Spain and other parts of Europe is that all ages are welcome and that all ages participate. In this country the youth are viewed with fear and suspicion - and this is especially true of working class youth. My feeling is that the young people involved in these disturbances are disconnected with the world they are destroying and that this is a product of this culture.

Anti Branding?

I teach graphic design at a University in London and one of my specialist the subjects is branding. The arguments made in COMPRA if read superficially seem to be anti branding and could be interpreted as being against the profession I promote to my students. This is not my position. There is  a problem within areas of the branding industry that stems out of a lack of respect for context and a need to create efficient homogenizing identity systems. I would encourage designers to respect what is there already, to respect tradition, heritage and content. The identity that Moving Brands created for Saville Row tailoring label E. Tautz is a good example of how designers can work with the heritage of a brand to create something rich and contemporary. We also should not to dismiss vernacular in favour of a universally acknowledged aesthetic. One size of Helvetica 55 does not fit all and if we want to produce work that lasts beyond the latest trend then we need to engage with subject matter and not the latest cool design blog. COMPRA is meant to be a celebration of visual languages that naturally evolve and are not imposed by an exterior force. I believe this is richer, more complex, more interesting and actually more relevant to the user. These users might not be familiar with the niche trend of the moment but they are not ignorant. If we actually consult with them and respect their opinion we will have something that is more relevant to their needs and actually more successful as a piece of design. 

Churros

On the recommendation of a friend I had churros for breakfast while in A Coruña. Churros are sticks of donut dough that are fried in a special machine, covered in sugar and then dipped in either a thick chocolate sauce or café con leche. Churrería are only open in the morning and sell only churros and coffee. They also tend to have a very distinctive interior with lots of zinc panelling. There is a chain called ‘Bonilla a la Vista’ in A Coruña and the Churrería I found was on Calle Galera, it had a beautifully traditional interior with marquetry panels, low circular zinc tables and dark wooden chairs. Romantically I imagined all Churrería to be like this but looking at the ‘Bonilla a la Vista’ website the other bars in the chain have not been designed with such respect for the original features! 

Typography

As a student of typography, the movement that was started by the Bauhaus and Jan Tschichold and later built upon by people like Muller Brockmann, Otl Aicher and Armin Hoffmann, until it became an international style, has always been an inspiration. In parts of Spain you can still find shop signs and architectural typography crudely executed in this style. They survive from a time before the design by committee refinements of the eighties and nineties. You can also find the sort of eccentric, decorative typography that originated at Push Pin studios and achieved mass distribution through companies like Letraset in the nineteen seventies. Finally, there are also many examples of pure vernacular - hand drawn, incorrectly spaced, mis-matched and imperfect. A Coruña had all of these curiosities and more: (click images to enlarge)