Essays in design
All decades have a delusive face. Viewed from a distance we are captured by their different names, ascribe each with sundry characteristics, and label them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, no more than any other ten-year span would be.
The Swinging ’60s started to sway somewhere in the ’50s and continued to reverberate in to the ’70s. It was a time when Britain rocked to the Beatles and Rolling Stones; was alarmed at the Great Train Robbery; and scandalised by the Profumo affair. Mary Quant dressed the nation’s youth and Terence Conran furnished their homes. David Bailey and Terence Donovan captured it all on camera and Oz magazine satirized it in print.
While ’60s society was swinging, typography was not idle. A succession of sans serif typefaces arrived quickly on the scene: Helvetica, Optima, Folio, Univers and Eurostile. New magazines were launched: Neue Graphik Design, Communications Arts, and Herb Lubalin’s Eros started in New York. The Fletcher|Forbes|Gill design agency was formed in London, and Adrian Frutiger joined Deberny Peignot in Paris. There were new tools for the designer when the fibre tip pen was invented, and Letraset retailed its first sheet of dry-transfer lettering. Offset lithography started its rise to pre-eminence and the first phototypeset book was produced; graphic reproduction techniques were refined, and computers became an industry reality.
In 1962 the British Design & Art Direction [D&AD] was founded as a professional association representing the UK’s thriving design and advertising communities. It aimed to set creative standards, educate and inspire the next generation, and promote the importance of good design. At the same time the Kynoch Press in Birmingham was forging its post-war typographic reputation. Started in the nineteenth century the Press had evolved with the times, updated its founts, equipped its pressroom with modern machines, and set-up a forward looking design studio run by Roger Denning.
In 1963 the D&AD and the Kynoch Press started collaborating on a short series of publications called Essays in design. Viewed retrospectively the Essays serve to mirror ’60s graphic trends, form a microcosm of varying tastes and techniques, and reflect the diversity of graphic communication of that period. The Essays were produced because the well-respected Kynoch Press wanted to create a more contemporary image for itself, prove it was in the vanguard of post-war printing developments, and show it was daring enough to support and court controversy in design. On the other hand, the newly created D&AD still had to establish its reputation. Working on innovative publications with a quality printer such as the Kynoch Press helped consolidate the D&AD’s place in ’60s graphic design culture.
The Essays coincided with the launch of the annual and influential D&AD Exhibition. Each Essay was handed over either to award winners at the D&AD exhibition or to other carefully selected designers both known and those still to rise to eminence. The designers were not constrained by any brief and were given a free platform to express their views on any subject about which they felt something should be said. Any medium could be used and normal commercial considerations were disregarded. Only two constraints were imposed: a page format of A4 and top limit on production costs. The Essays in design were published quarterly; a complimentary copy was given to customers and prospective customers who took an interest in design for printing. Additional copies were available at 6s. each, or one guinea for four issues.
A glittering selection of ‘60s ‘it’ people made up the contributors to the Essays in design. Tom Wolsey and William Klein produced the first of the Essays. Wolsey was a leading ’60s advertising figure who art directed Michael Heseltine’s Man about Town. Town was a rumbustious life-style magazine that epitomised ‘60s culture and which was the epicentre for the designer jet set including David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Mary Quant and Twiggy. William Klein was one of the most important photographers in the 1960s and famous for his strikingly intense book of photographs, Life is good for you in New York. He also produced bizarrely original photography for Vogue where he took fashion out of the studio and into the streets. Terence Donovan contributed to the Essays in design as one of Britain's greatest photographers whose fashion shots revealed the changing face of London. Working for Elle and Marie-Claire in Paris, and Harper's Bazaar in Milan and New York, he created the ’60s look with wonderful portraits that became the faces of their time.
Three British designers were persuaded to contribute to the Essays, they included: Derek Birdsall of BDMW Associates, a distinguished graphic designer of the 1960s who was responsible for first Pirelli Calendar in 1964, the Monty Python books, and a large number of Penguin book jackets; Anthony Froshaug a typographer who taught at the Watford School of Art, the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London before setting-up as a one-man printer in Cornwall; and John Donegau, a London based art director.
Two North American’s each produced an Essay in design. Bob Gill was a graphic designer who started the London design office of Fletcher|Forbes|Gill, later returning to New York to write and design Beatlemania, a multi-media Broadway musical. He was given a D&AD Lifetime Achievement Award. Triple Oscar winner Richard Williams produced the final Essay. Williams was a Canadian animator, who found fame with his films Who framed Roger Rabbit, The return of the Pink Panther, and A Christmas carol and who won over 250 international awards including 3 Oscars, 3 British Academy Awards, and an Emmy.
Thomas Wolsey and William Klein created the first Essay in design. They took the words of Ogden Nash as the title for their work:
I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I’ll never see a tree at all.
Their response was a visual essay on advertising and the environment and comprised a montage of expressive city images from around the world. Each image contained letterforms generated by printing, neon lighting, or by hand and that were found on billboards, shop fascias, political banners and protest posters. All the photographs included people interacting with the adverts; the images were intended to demonstrate that advertising in the twentieth century surrounds us both outside and inside our homes, and that the simple human activity of salesmanship had become a high finance industry.
Klein's visual language documented adverts in city life surrounded urban chaos. With his images he made an asset out of photographic accident, graininess, blur, and distortion. He employed a wide-angle lens, fast film, and novel framing and printing techniques to make disjointed, lawless images that emphasized the raw immediacy of the scene he was photographing. His images were uncompromising; they were bold and superficially scruffy and degenerate. The pictures were in direct opposition to the model of elegance, discretion and accepted standards of formal quality he saw in the images of the Magnum photographers. But Klein’s photographic techniques projected what real life looked like in to pictures, and by doing so he enlarged the photographers vocabulary.
‘Typographic Norms’ was the title Anthony Froshaug gave to his Essay in design. It was an original and experimental argument for the advantages of standardisation in printing: regulation of paper size, type size, binding, printing colours, and printing techniques. Froshaug attempted to identify norms for line-spacing material. He showed the relative width of spacing material in sizes ranging from 5 to 72 point by means of tabular matter that was then re-displayed as visual analogues. Where spacing material of one size coincided in width with spacing material of another size it was printed in red (for example, when a 5 point em space was equal to a 10 point thick space). It was an Essay that demanded much and explained little and readers were left to fathom the theory and surmise the value for themselves. Most of them must have been baffled, as was one particular member of the Kynoch Press remembered:
"To this day I can’t understand what he was trying to do. But it was something to do with the 12pt unit and he’d got this twisted thing on his mind about this 12pt unit and you’d open the book and there were 12pt dots getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t read it and I couldn’t explain it to anybody. I don’t know what it was about. It was typography gone wrong for me."
Although the Press and many of customers may have found Froshaug’s Essay bewildering and perhaps even inappropriate as piece of advertising, it is a slice of the typographic debate that has generated much interest over the 40 years since its production.
‘Women throooo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan’ was a poetic-photographic Essay for which Donovan had created seventeen small monochrome images of women and written stream of consciousness verse to accompany his pictures. The photographs showed women in a way that freed them from the role of angel in the kitchen or glamour icon; instead, Donovan focused on the ordinary to capture the extraordinary. Typically he took his models to East End tenements or got them to pose on gasometer platforms. He delighted in juxtaposing masculine symbols of an industrial age with the beauty of the female form whether it was adorned or not. He enjoyed setting glamour and charm against the grit and the seediness of modern London. Donovan also took delight in shocking: one of his images set Celia Hamilton [one of the top models of the 1960s] on the toilet. Through his photography he managed to combine an unabashed and straightforward sexual interest in women with an unbroken attachment to his East End origins. In doing this, Terence Donovan created a version of chic peculiar to his time and re-adjusted the public’s way of looking at life.
‘Women throooo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan’ was also an essay in photographic techniques. Donovan showed how images could be enhanced when photographed out of focus, or in soft focus; the drama that could be got from flare or burn-out in the developing process; and the atmosphere that could be added by over- or under-developing a film. He showed what could be achieved when ‘bad’ photography, handled skilfully, could become ‘good’ practice.
‘Bob Gill’s New York’ was a highly personal visual account of New York City reproduced by the nib and brush of a graphic designer and illustrator. The cover is a representation of America’s greatest commercial symbol: Coca Cola. Inside Gill presents big, brash, colourful images of commercial street life. The images are larger than life parodies of what Gill saw and they reflect the personality of both the city and Bob Gill. The Essay was all pictures and no words; it allowed the spirited, roughly drawn images to express the magnificent bizarre humour and razzmatazz of Bob Gill’s New York.
In the 1960s graphic designers had the new problem of competing with other mediums such as cinema and television for the attention of the public. These other mediums had special effects that were dazzling, and the graphic designer had to vie with this magic but without the aid of technology, big budgets or much time. Gill believed that if a graphic designer was to attract attention he had to use tactics that were in opposition to television: rather than create a fantasy, he had to take a careful look at the world and expose its reality to his audience. ‘Bob Gill’s New York’ did just that; he looked at his subject matter with fresh eyes, saw new and interesting things in the city, and revealed them to his audience in an original, humorous and insightful way. Humour is one of Bob Gill’s greatest assets, and it is that quality that was brought to the fore in his Essay.
‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ was Derek Birdsall’s Essay in Design. It was a mixed media Essay that reflected his belief that graphic design was no longer merely planographic; it had a front, back and profile. Graphic design had also evolved to a point that it could call on more than just typefaces and words with which to solve problems: there was photography, illustration, graphics, and symbols and devices both ancient and modern. Birdsall used the visual symbol of the pyramid to explain graphic design: there were many mediums available to the designer, each layering and supporting the other. His visual metaphor was accompanied by a written explanation:
Graphic design and imagery have now reached a high degree of development and sophistication. The wheel has turned full circle: graphic designers have rediscovered the written word and are involved in communication in a total and unbiased sense. The wheel has become a sphere: surface design now involves depth, motivation etc; in film and television, two-dimensional design has gone into three dimensions. No longer preoccupied with replacing language by visual shorthand, the graphic designer is concerned with language as an integral of his invention. He uses words where he recognises they give greater precision, photography or drawing where the ideas to express are elusive or equivocal. He is therefore much better equipped to realise his potential in the analysis and solution of problems of communication. Never before has he had more opportunity, through his work, legitimately to develop and refine our awareness, perception and sensibility.
‘Tell me, do you actually draw anything? . . .’ was the Essay composed by John Donegau. Donegau chose to work with fibre-tipped pens of red, black and blue. Although the fibre tip pens were originally used in the 1940s with coarse wool tips, these were little more than crude applicators of ink being predominantly used for labelling and artistic work. The invention of the modern fibre tip pen happened in 1962 and Donegau elected to compose his Essay with this truly contemporary tool that became an indispensable utensil of the period. The subject of his Essay was another modern tool: the art director. Donegau’s work was a light-hearted discussion and critique of the much-maligned role of the art director in the creative process, and it provided a visual and descriptive insight into the workings of the newly emerging and expanding profession. Cartoon self-portraits sat solidly on the pages. They were hastily executed in the manner of thumbnail roughs or design concepts in gestation, and provide an appropriate medium for the stream of consciousness narrative that accompanied the images. Type, in this Essay, as in many of the others, had been abandoned in favour of the designer’s own hand, creating an immediacy and intimacy of direct contact between designer and reader.
Richard Williams was an interesting and appropriate final choice of essayist. He produced a fantasy piece entitled ‘Confidence Man!’ that brought in to the realm of print media Williams’ reputation for creating high quality inventive animation. He was the only one of the seven essayist that dealt in moving images, and it is a sense of motion and freedom that he brought to his Essay. Three parallel stories are revealed in segments drawn as if they were for animation: a tightly drawn coy young woman who becomes looser and more abandoned, both in attitude and creation, as the sequence progresses; a sommelier who losses and then regains the balance of his tray; and a parody of St George slaying the dragon, where the dragon was substituted for a crocodile. Threaded through the centre of the Essay was some extravagant lettering that unravelled to proclaim ‘Confidence Man!’ Whether it is a statement or instruction is unclear. But what is apparent is that Williams, like all his fellow essayists, presented his work with a brash self-assurance that was synonymous of the period.
The Essays in design was a flexible medium for publicising new ’60s graphic advances. The Essays provided a visual commentary on the new approaches to design that arose from new techniques, and in some cases, the medium itself was the message.
The photographic Essays were innovative not only in approach to subject matter and photographic techniques; they also benefited from’60s printing technology that allowed a richer reproduction of black giving a more faithful impression of a photograph. All the Essays were made with carefully selected paper. In the ’60s there was a lot of innovative work with paper, and most designers were dipping their toes in the water for the first time, experimenting with tinted and textured stock, and trying-out mixed make-ups. It was very much part of the ‘60s typo movement and the Essays provided a showcase for paper as well as print. The choice of an A4 format was significant. Although the DIN paper sizes had been accepted by the ISO in 1958, they were not in common use in the UK in the early ’60s. The Essays, therefore, were also an early argument for the acceptance of standardisation of paper sizes.
In design terms, the Essays deliberately abandoned convention and dispensed with graphic straight jackets. The typographic mood was changing and the designer was no longer pure in his approach. The Essays were an exploration in new ways of communicating, and they demanded active participation from the reader rather than passive reception. All the Essays presented visual or intellectual puzzles, images had to be unravelled and graphic questions answered. The reader was challenged.
The Essays were a release after years of post-war austerity and awakened a spirit of magic in graphic design. They served as an experimental and controversial catwalk for the profession, and although their approaches to design were not necessarily the ones industrial clients adopted outright, but they were the inspiration behind more pedestrian solutions. The Essays were showcases, stimulating and valuable productions of their day.
CAROLINE ARCHER
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| Anthony Froshaug's 'Typographic Norms' |
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| Bob Gill's 'New York' |
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| John Donegau's ‘Tell me, do you actually draw anything? . . .’ |
