Jim Northover

Introductory note in First Edition, a publication by graduating students of the London College of Communication MA programme in Design Writing Criticism 2010

Design famously defies definition. It's all around us, impacting our lives on a daily basis, but it's hard to pin down. So maybe we should explore rather than attempt to define, in order that our multiple explorations allow the territory to be mapped out and examined in some detail, and to see what we can discover.

The projects and theses that form the culmination of the course do just that: they explore the boundaries, probe the surface and examine what lies beneath. Culture and commerce, lifestyle and technology, politics and gender, text and image, environment and fashion are scrutinised with forensic intensity. From the virtual world of social networks, video games and hacking to the tangible forms of places, products and the human body, the writers tackle a wide range of topics and emerge with a complex array of takes on design and its contemporary practice.

The evidence shows that design is an expanding universe, that the verities of physicality are being matched by a world in which meaning derives from every form of expression or communication, where systems and networks drive the flow of information and interaction, and where changes in society and the environment provide an ever-present background.

The need for interrogation, for commentary, for critique has never been greater, we would argue. Without an informed debate we risk much, but with understanding and imagination so much can be achieved. The writers graduating from this course can be both advocates and challengers, campaigning for design's positive influence on our lives and warning us of its potential dangers. Perhaps more important than the topics and debates themselves are the sounds of divergent voices. From different backgrounds, cultures and disciplines these voices grow ever stronger and speak more clearly as they move from the shadows of academia into the full light of day.

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.

Talk delivered at Brunel University Business School 4 December 2009

For years now, brands and branding have been associated with goods and services, mainly those we see, buy and use everyday. The world of marketing has focused on these because that’s where the big money lies, or has done.

We also know that business to business brands are important as companies are consumers of goods and services too. We have become conscious that it is not just the individual products or services that are branded to make them memorable and distinctive, but it’s the organisations behind them as well. There are all sorts of reasons why we need to be concerned about corporate brands. Trust is one. Our attitude to corporate brands in the financial services market is an obvious example. Ethics is another. We are increasingly concerned about the social and environmental impact of corporations on our world. As information travels further and faster we get to know what’s going on.

Of course, brand owners want us to know more (about the right stuff, naturally) and to know more about us, so we can engage more closely with their brands. Increasingly, they want brands to create an experience that builds loyalty, empathy and even affection. But managing that experience is not as easy as it was. To some extent that is the role clients want us to play. To help them coordinate every aspect of what they do, however and wherever they touch their audiences.

And it’s no longer just the consumers we’re talking about, it’s all of those stakeholders our clients want to influence. More and more this means investors, governments, the media, and, of course, employees and potential recruits.

The channels through which brands now interface with all these stakeholders have increased phenomenally. The internet alone has been responsible for transforming the world of branding by creating an astonishing range of networks and relationships. Brand management as a consequence has become much more complex. For the brand owners, it feels like they no longer own the brand at all. And they’re probably right. Even from a legal standpoint, the intellectual property safeguarded through trademark and patent law is either being directly challenged or ignored in many parts of the world.

Even more significantly perhaps, is the sense that stakeholders really do have a stake in the brand. One of the successes of branding is that consumers (as we still call them) are now much more proprietorial about brands than ever they were. “You can’t do that with my brand!” Or even “I’ll tell you where you need to go with the brand next.”

This has changed the nature of the relationship between the two parties. Probably forever. The idea of the brand increasingly revolves around a tense partnership, a tussle between those who choose to be engaged in the debate.

I believe there is a sense in which everyone is operating on a more individual, personalised level nowadays. For example, the division between home time and work time has eroded considerably. While there are more opportunities for employees to work from home rather than attend the office, the quid pro quo is that they are now contactable via email, phone and Blackberry on a constant basis. Not only that but great sections of the community are effectively self-employed or contractors without any single corporate affiliation.

Communications have freed us up and simultaneously enchained us to our work. And even when we are working we are using individual networks and contacts to make our business operate. Linked-in is an example of social networking concepts now operating in the corporate space.

All this is changing how we see ourselves. If we started out by being viewed by brands as ‘consumers’ this term now seems offensive – an undignified role in which we uncritically devour whatever capital and enterprise have to throw at us.

We moved on to being customers, whereby we were seen to have a contractual relationship at least, and the idea of customer service has gained traction over recent decades, such that businesses re-oriented themselves around satisfying defined needs and expectations, rather than just selling product. With all that’s been happen around us economically, and this time on a global scale, we must be ready for another re-appraisal of brands and their role.

Against the background of a corporate world based on wealth creation, enterprise and market-driven economics there has been a separate, parallel development in branding.

For some time now it has been clear that the power of brands to inform, engage, persuade and empower has not been lost on other institutions in our society, whether they are government bodies and departments, government agencies, non-governmental organisations, or entities moving from the public to the private sector, or becoming elements in a public-private partnerships.

The responsibility for delivering public services, including housing, transport, health, education and culture, for example, often in competition to private provision, has forced these organisations to see what they could learn from brands. Some of the lessons learned in the period of the Thatcher government in the UK clearly turned out to be flawed. Seeing a market in everything was an interesting paradigm in that it served to help re-focus some organisations on what they were there for, but, equally, many new structures built fundamental weaknesses into the system, some of which we are just beginning to discover as capital markets falter.

Nevertheless society needs infrastructure in all its forms. Without that continuity of purpose and investment, many of the services we take for granted would simply cease to be.

As consultants we have been involved in some of these changes, acting to help make change happen, not to comment on its political or social significance. Which is fortunate because, looking back over a lengthy career one sees initiatives fall by the wayside, institutions stumble and fail, errors of judgment become exposed.

But it’s not all bad. I think we are beginning to see how branding can have a social function that isn’t some return to Marxist doctrine post a capitalist collapse, but returns to my earlier notion of how we are operating as individuals so much more these days. And part of that individuality and the sense of personal identity and space in which we operate is counterbalanced by an awakening understanding of our wider social role in the world. We are coming to realise, perhaps a bit late in the day, that we can’t leave things to the experts, whether they are in government or in enterprise. Gradually we are re-engaging with our own lives and our interconnectness with the lives of others. And, of course, our environment.

It seems to me that we are in the process of seeing ourselves increasingly as citizens, members of a society that operates around places, infrastructures and enterprises, all of which have a bearing on our individuality and our part in a wider whole. In this context, branding can have a role in building these multiple relationships. Some of these will remain commercial in nature, others more social or cultural.

It’s one thing to identify change happening (perhaps not so difficult in present conditions), but it’s another to see what that change will mean.

So, for now it remains an observation, the beginnings of a discourse and a prompt for you and others to think about.

Review of Eric Gill at the Royal Academy for FAD website

“I have found, as a biographer, that you do not choose your subjects. It is more that they sit in your mind waiting to claim you.” When Fiona MacCarthy wrote this she must have pondered what it was about Eric Gill that made him sit in her mind to start with, now that we know perhaps more than we ever bargained for about some aspects of his life story. With Gill’s work forming part of an upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled ‘Wild Thing’, and our heightened sensibility through media coverage towards abusive sexual relationships, especially involving children, it seems we are bound to reflect on how artists’ works and lives interact.

From way back artists have been associated with often chaotic and indecorous behaviour. Many of them led complicated sex lives, often less shocking today than they might have been at the time, but with some things we tend to draw the line. For most people even today, and certainly as far legality is concerned, Gill went too far. Just one look at the varied index references in MacCarthy’s biography of Gill provides enough clues. The question is how it affects his work and how we view it.

The curious thing is that the closest most of us ever get to Gill’s work is through the typefaces he designed, ones we see on a daily basis in print, in signing or online. Although not as ubiquitous as a few years ago, Gill Sans is still a common font, even on our computers. A close inspection of the letterforms reveals something that is identifiably modern, but still distinctly classical, referring back to Roman inscriptions from which Gill drew ideas and inspiration. This purity of form is even more pronounced in his Perpetua typeface, the height of good breeding and historic sensitivity. How could a mind so refined and a hand so skilled belong to this other individual?

If we look at Gill’s drawings and prints, or even Gill’s infamous relief re-titled Ecstasy (replacing Gill’s own unambiguous title Fucking) we see, or at least I do, a remarkable sensitivity that is more chaste than consciously erotic. Ecstasy takes the human forms and moulds them in an embrace that is touching and intimate. That the models were Gill’s sister (with whom Gill had an incestuous relationship) and her husband does nothing to change our initial reaction.

Undoubtedly some of his private works were salacious, whilst other commissions were deeply religious in tone. One work explicitly uses sex to make a political point. His carving Votes for Women (purchased by the economist John Maynard Keynes) is described by MacCarthy as showing ‘the act of intercourse with woman ascendant, man semi-recumbent.’ In a curious way the political message here could not have been more modern. As MacCarthy comments ‘it is both very pure and very shocking.’

Though full of ambiguity as Gill’s life was, not just sexually and morally, but riven through his writing, his domestic and working relationships and his spiritual preoccupations, his work as an artist and as a designer still stands out with searing clarity. Something it is difficult to argue with.

*MacCarthy, F. ‘Mad about sex’ (Guardian 17 October) 2009

‘Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill’ at the Royal Academy 24 October 2009-24 January 2010*