The other day I came across this pencil, one of many we made as part of a Lloyd Northover promotion some time ago. The words seem to encapsulate what design is and does. They still feel right eight years or so later.
This is Reillanne. A little town perched on a hill in the south of France. A sky from a Tiepolo painting. A Renaissance image captured on a walk in the countryside. Ascension Day. Only a figure of the ascending Christ is left to the imagination.
This month is a small cause for celebration: three and half decades of design consultancy. There are a few companies around from those days still bearing the same names and still with a founder involved in the business, but not many.
It’s been a rocky ride at times, but the business is still there and it continues to survive and thrive.
It all started back in the sixties when John Lloyd and I were students at what was then the London College of Printing. We graduated in 1968, the ‘soixante huit’ of student unrest, the ‘summer of love’ and all that. It took us till the mid seventies to make the leap and start on our own. Rather like now it was a period of slow economic recovery, and starting anything seemed either brave or stupid, perhaps both.
At the time, anniversaries seemed significant and when we had survived our first year in business we celebrated by opening a bottle or two of champagne, thus starting a tradition. The photo above shows dated corks from the first 15 years’ anniversaries.
After 10 years we started recording anniversaries with the design and distribution of t-shirts to our friends and clients. For some these became collectors’ items, with a few surviving today.
In our 15th year we all flew to Paris for the day – the kind of extravagance that was expected of a successful design group. This photograph records the event. Here we are in front of I M Pei’s newly opened Louvre pyramid. It was a good, and as I remember it, very long day.
Some things come in twos. Partnerships often work best in creative businesses: opposing viewpoints, dynamic tension, complementary skills, integrated teamwork can bring out the best in design. After all it is increasingly accepted that design depends on collaboration more than on individual brilliance.
There are plenty of great design partnerships around today, although writing your name over the door is less usual now. Perhaps it was egotism or simply a sense of professional seriousness that persuaded Wolff Olins, Minale Tattersfield, Sampson Tyrrell, Lewis Moberly, Newell & Sorrell, Carroll & Dempsey, Smith & Milton, Trickett & Webb, Lloyd Northover and others to turn their names into brands.
Their founders have mostly moved on or re-formed, their companies sometimes absorbed, the names changed, and little recognition of the originals survive. Some companies are also life partnerships as well as professional ones. Others have moved into second-generation management. Nothing stands still, least of all the partners themselves. A look at the images of John and Jim below, in 1975 and again 30 years later, demonstrates the effects of time and the endurance of friendship.
Going to see Enron in London’s West End last week was to witness an acerbic indictment of corporate excess and self-delusion. As the play pointed out, we all bear some responsibility for the way the corporate world has frequently lost sight of its reason for being.
However, there was a time when Enron looked like a company going places and innovating. It commissioned Paul Rand, one of the most respected corporate designers of his generation, to design the logo and identity for the company.
Today that logo comes readymade as the identity for the play itself, liberally used on all promotional material and signing. I wondered who now owns the rights to that piece of intellectual property. No doubt Rand cheerfully assigned the rights to the company once he was paid for his work. Today the company no longer exists. The brand is ‘worthless’. But for play’s promoters it’s a useful piece of identity nevertheless.
This week saw the takeover of Cadbury by Kraft Foods. Cadbury is another name in the lengthening line of British household names disappearing from the corporate scene. While there is no room for sentimentality in business (as one UK bank chief executive memorable once said to me) the move does give cause for thinking through the rationale and the likely outcome of the merger. Most commentators agree that the financial benefits to Kraft are potentially significant, helping it reach international markets it has not been able to penetrate successfully so far. Clearly, it adds some major brands, of which Cadbury is obviously the foremost, to its portfolio.
It also seems that little interest in being paid to the Cadbury corporate brand, the company with a history and culture that made it distinctive and gave it a reputation for fairness with its employees and in its business practices. While there is little doubt that Cadbury exploited its suppliers of cocoa way back, it also practiced enlightened philanthropy towards its employees. The whole notion of Bournville, quaint though it seems today, was a concept ahead of its time. It was the last surviving chocolate company founded by Quakers; Rowntree’s and Fry’s being devoured long ago.
As deals are increasingly done at a purely short-term financial level, and brands change hands scarcely without a blink, the passing of corporate entities and their cultures goes unremarked. One of the objectives of the corporate identity ‘movement’, if I can call it that, was to project internally and externally the true nature and worth of the business ethos. Companies like IBM became classics of this paradigm.
With Kraft’s takeover, it will be interesting to see how the cultures will blend, if at all. The idea that anything of the Cadbury ethos will remain seems unlikely , as the two cultures appear to have little in common; just a case of the difference between ‘choc and cheese’ perhaps.
Hayward Gallery 14 October-10 January Review published in Blueprint 285 December 2009
It’s not often that a graphic designer grows up to become a world-renowned painter. But that’s just what Ed Ruscha has achieved. Unlike Warhol, Ruscha started out in the world of print and commercial graphics, not illustration. His early design training runs like a thread through all his work. Rather than make this connection directly, the Hayward’s Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting concentrates purely on his painted output. This means we don’t get the benefit of seeing the process of his thinking and practice, but oddly it seems to emphasise the rollover effect from graphic media to fine art.
I can clearly imagine Ruscha in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, setting type at the Plantin Press, or working on layouts and paste-ups in the Carson/Roberts ad agency a few years later. The meticulous process of working directly with type, enlarging images, tracing lettering and laying flat colours can detach you from the purpose of the work in hand. While learning the craft it seems likely that Ruscha’s mind was elsewhere. As soon as he was able to concentrate on his own work he took type, lettering and logos out of their real world contexts. Voiding them of commercial purpose, he let them stand ‘suspended in space as well as meaning’, as he put it. The transition from ‘designed’ context to paint on canvas disrupts our interpretation on a number of levels – we see the word as an image in its own right, we examine and reflect on language and how its meaning is transformed, we look at the shape of letters and how they are painted, rather than how we are used to seeing them, reproduced as print or signs.
As his 50 year career demonstrates, Ruscha didn’t stop with type. His observational reach encompasses landscape, architecture and cinema. Small objects, such as tablets and pills suspended in space as still life compositions, become subtle commentaries. He changes focus from micro to macro, from formal titles (‘The study of friction and wear on mating surfaces’) to snatched conversation (‘Wen out for cigrets n never came back’). His juxtapositions are by turns wry, uplifting, engaging and enigmatic. His vision stretches across half a century and a whole continent, bringing a scale and boldness we have come to associate with much American art, at the same time providing a knowing critique of urban life on the West Coast.
He prompts our memories and feeds our imaginations: flying into LA at night, the patchwork grid of lights below us seen through an atmospheric haze; the scratchy black and white film, flickering to a standstill (‘The End’), projector still whirring; and, of course, the gas stations seen from ground level: staging posts across the West, recast as retail architecture.
There’s much in this impressive show of what Ruscha calls his ‘information age art’ to feast our eyes on, interrogate and scratch our heads about, but its playfulness guarantees enjoyment. At least for this graphic designer.
Beckley, East Sussex December 2009