Things to look at, things to read

This time I did.

If I were to do a vanity google, the results would overwhelmingly be to do with this, mainly because I’m mentioned in the credits (which proved quite controversial with my employer, but did result in my own discogs profile).

Which is a bit strange, really. I don’t feel it’s hugely representative of me as a designer. In fact, I don’t really feel like it’s ‘my work’ at all. As Neil alluded to in his comment on my last post, attribution can sometimes be a tricky thing.

Belle and Sebastian’s sleeves up to and including Dear Catastrophe Waitress were designed by Andrew Symington of Divine. I took over on the Funny Little Frog and Books singles, and the Life Pursuit album. Emma Howlett from D8′s Glasgow office followed that. On the face of it, there does seem to be a difference stylistically, certainly between Funny Little Frog, The Life Pursuit and the sleeves that preceded them. Looking at it from the outside, it would be natural to attribute that to the change of designer.

Yet that isn’t really how I remember it. The designs were collaborative to an unusual degree, the process usually starting with Stuart Murdoch bringing cover photos into the studio – these are always taken by him. We’d then sit side by side at a mac and work up the designs, going back and forth with suggestions and saving each design that we liked as a new page in the document.

I can’t speak for Belle and Sebastian’s other sleeve designers, but the sleeves I worked on arose from collaboration rather than a spark of inspiration. The process always seemed to move forward in tiny increments, but a comparison between the initial design and the one which went to print showed a huge amount of progress in between. If there was a change of style in the way the sleeves were designed, it’s because one of the two people collaborating on the sleeve design had changed, which naturally resulted in a different dynamic. It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision.

I think a lot of design happens like that. Despite the preponderance of stories about a lone genius having a eureka moment – Alan Fletcher designing the V&A logo in the shower springs to mind – but those stories achieve fame precisely because they’re not the norm. Most design is at heart a collaboration. That does make apportioning credit a bit messy.

So yes, I did design this cover. But collectively, not alone.

No I didn’t.

I did get sent a portfolio today which had some of my work in it though, which is a first for me. The designer in question spent a day in our studio (which turned into a four-week placement by the time it had reached his cv) and came up with some initial ideas for the project. They weren’t used and he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the visual in his portfolio. Dishonest, stupid, yes. But also lacking ambition. At least I nicked the poster from Weingart.

I see quite a few portfolios. Finding my work passed off as someone else’s isn’t usually a problem, but in a wider sense context almost always is. Most graduate portfolios contain work for clients you’d recognise, but without any explanation whether they’re student projects, pitch work undertaken on a placement, or actual live work. All of those are viable things to show, but they each tell you very different things about a designer.

Neil McGuire has made an interesting point about the potential for the web to create alternative identities alongside the original. If a google search for ‘Kunst Kredit designer’ brings this blog out top and the viewer is credulous enough to believe the claim in the headline, in effect I become the owner of the work, even though I clearly had nothing to do with it. I steal authorship of Weingart’s work. An extreme example, but what if I instead decide to redesign the poster, without any reference to the original, and it remains the top-ranked google search? As long as the images remain without context, I still claim an equivalence between my purely speculative project and Weingart’s published original. I don’t steal authorship from Weingart, but I do steal legitimacy. This seems like semantics, but it’s potentially a real issue. What else was the Moving Brands/HP affair if not a fight over just this kind of context? Moving Brands unusued identity proposal gained legitimacy from its display alongside work HP did actually commission. The fact that you can no longer see much of what Moving Brands put up tells it’s own story.

Hito Steyerl’s celebrated In Defense of the Poor Image posits the circulation of poor quality copied artworks as a kind of afterlife. The artworks are divorced from the originals both in terms of quality and context, free to access, but also free to become something else entirely. To a degree that’s true of graphic design, but to a much larger extent the opposite is also true – much graphic design has become about the circulation of images which are better quality than the originals they represent, if there is an original at all. Works are photographed, retouched, livesurfaced for circulation on the blogs, tumblr and Fffound. The reproduction becomes the important thing, the context a void. (Neil again)

I’ve no idea what this means for design, or whether it’s a bad thing. The power of the old media, of branding, derived largely from the control of high quality images, so perhaps the democratisation of these images is no bad thing. I do know that it’s entirely feasible to set up a professional looking website for a graphic design company, fill it with shots of good looking work and circulate those images globally, without any of it having ever existed. And I’d suggest that’s a pretty fundamental change since the five-year-old me designed the poster at the top of this post.

“‘There was a big split at Verso,’ he recalls. ‘Some people were just horrified. It’s a valuable lesson, which I often talk about with students. It was a shock to me to bring in a piece of work I was so excited about and find people thinking I was having some kind of joke. But there’s no reason why you should expect someone who’s commissioning you to be involved in your agenda. It’s not fair. You really have to make it quite clear what you want to do and the reasons for it. If they are into it, they are into it. The worst thing is to force an agenda. You wouldn’t want that to happen to you.’

On this occasion Elliman won enough support for three of the covers to be given the go-ahead. But the lesson has clearly been learned the hard way from subsequent clients. ‘I have this almost fluorescent trail of rejected work behind me,’ he says.’”

From ‘Other Spaces’ an article on Paul Elliman in Eye 25. A considered appraisal of Elliman can be found here.

“‘We are interested in your work’, the advertising agents tend to say, but there the matter rests, and they have not gone beyond that point.

And that is because Grapus’s work is not neutral, nor are the relations of the four with their principals. Grapus influences both the message and the clients. First the group has to agree on what they want them to convey. If not, then this means a rupture as with the CGT. The the message is maltreated, it is pulled out on all sides, it is distorted, it is made provocative, disgraceful sexual jokes are added, they make sure to transgress certain taboos. …

Gérard Paris Clavel likes to speak of ‘the image of pleasure’ and ‘the pleasure of the image’. Well, Grapus’s images are not always a pleasure to look at, sometimes they are even outright aggressive, if not repulsive. Grapus likes a seemingly rambling lay-out, congested and tiring now and then. But the whole attracts attention, it appeals. The on-looker becomes part of the discussion, and that is the purpose aimed at. For the client this process is not always that easy to digest. For he is being discussed and that can be embarrassing and sometimes unacceptable. Something like that occurred with a branch of the Comédie Française, the Petit Odéon. Two of the six ordered posters were rejected and remade – unjustly according to Grapus, since the first version was better. The whole theatre felt rather uncomfortable with the images of these non-conformist graphic artists: the actors because their names had been scrawled on the posters, or weren’t large enough, the other employees because the posters had not been or could not be fixed on the usual places, etc. The campaign was not repeated.”

From Grapus 85: Various Different Attempts.

‘There’s a modern confusion about “authentic”. People demand “authenticity” in the art they consume, but what they usually get is some corporate constructed cliché delivered with no true feelings whatsoever. Whereas we deliver discourse on this point, bringing attention to it in an extremely personal, committed and devoted way. And people say it’s “arch”, “ironic”, “distant”, but certainly not “authentic”.

It’s easy to understand why people would find this unpleasant, of course. But it’s still depressing that people consume so much shit and then moan when you point out what they’re eating.’

From here. Image from here.

That’s it.

At the end of 2010 I gave myself six rules for 2011. Ideally I should have looked back at this at the end of the year, but there was no let up in my workload and I ran out of time, so I’m going to quickly go over them here.

1/ Do five good things
Creatively it certainly felt like my best year for a while. Starting with the Vivid Pioneers brochure I had a run of projects that would almost certainly be going into my portfolio if I had such a thing. Off the top of my head I’d say the aforementioned Pioneers, as well as Ecstatic and Crash for Vivid, the Bang Bang logo for Trevor Pitt and an overhaul of the Companis logo would be my favourites. I’m working on a couple of things which I can’t really talk about as they’re quite early on, but which definitely belong to last year creatively and I’ll be really happy with them if they go through as planned. When I set a target of five I thought it was just realistic enough to be achievable, but I’ve probably hit it comfortably in the end. Got to be pretty happy with that.

2/ Make time
Working by myself this wasn’t always easy, but I think I just about managed. I could probably do with another couple with the amount of energy invested that went into the Pioneers brochure before I can be totally happy though.

3/ Idea, image, layout, text, object
I’ve probably been less content to lean on knowledge I already have and my work this year seems a lot more varied in format and appearance. Still work to do here though.

4/ Surprise yourself first
Again, I’ve definitely been pushing myself further into uncharted territory than I’ve perhaps been comfortable with in the past – in the case of the Bang Bang posters, to the degree where I’m still not entirely sure what I think of them, which can only be a good thing.

5/ See it through
It’s difficult to judge this, as there’s always a slight difference between the job as you imagined it and what is actually produced. I can’t think of anything that I’m totally disappointed with though, which is probably a good sign.

6/ Tell people about it
Patently, I haven’t done this. I started out with good intentions, but the fact that I’m talking about work most of you won’t have seen tells it’s own story. In mitigation, I’m slightly uncomfortable with promoting my work as an individual when I’m part of a wider company, despite the fact that everything I’ve mentioned has been solely my work. There’s also the time factor – even before factoring in the arrival of our second child there hasn’t really been much time to photograph work and upload it. Lame but true.

A partial success then, but definitely worth doing. So much so in fact…

When I first moved to Birmingham I was quoted in design magazine The Drum as saying “Birmingham’s location is great for accessing most places in England, the city itself being on the cusp of reinventing itself in the same way that Glasgow has over the past decade”.

There are quite a few things wrong with that as a statement – the suggestion that Birmingham’s proximity to other, more exciting places is it’s most important feature. The comparison to another, apparently more exciting place. The fact that it’s an absolute clunker of a sentence – cusp? seriously? In truth, I didn’t really know Birmingham very well at the time and I wrote it quickly, in response to a request for some rough thoughts from someone at work, not really expecting it to appear as a direct quote.

The thing is, I actually meant it as a positive.

I moved to Glasgow in 1999, just before the UK City of Architecture and Design celebrations began. Regeneration had kicked in big style, but there was still a roughness to the city that made it feel alive. The Glasgow School of Art’s international reputation meant there were a lot of really good artists, designers and architects in the city, and cheap rents in the city’s old industrial spaces encouraged them to stay. You could feel the energy in the Merchant City, the city’s old industrial district. Galleries and artist spaces seemed spring from the ground, a short cut down an alley could lead to a chance encounter with Douglas Gordon’s Empire (the repair of it’s flickering bulb by a council electrician seemingly an urban myth).

Inevitably, that kind of grass roots regeneration led to a more ‘official’ version. Though there’s still plenty of interesting stuff happening there, the Merchant City is kind of like a theme park version of itself now, developments like Merchant Square and Trongate 103 a sanitised, mass market simulation of what went before. I still love Glasgow, but when I left it seemed less a place of possibility than it did when I arrived. There seemed much more creative potential in Birmingham. There still does.

I came here to set up a design studio. In that situation the most important question you have to ask is where you’re going to get work, especially if you’re part of a commercial design firm. In Glasgow, the City Council commission a lot of design work for the various festivals in the city, most of it going to the small design studios that dominate the city’s design scene. It’s rarely amazing work, but it’s regular and the council are legally obliged to pay you within 30 days, so it’s a magnet for startups. New business trick number one is to look at the client list of other studios like you and approach the people on it for work. So one startup working for the council becomes two, then three, then four, until you’ve got an established route for a small design business to follow. That’s just one example of course, but cumulatively all of these quirks of the place produce a series of models for how a ‘Glasgow Design Studio’ should look.

The models in Birmingham are subtly different. For the size of the city, there are surprisingly few small design studios. That’s not to be disparaging about the ones that are here, it’s just comparatively there a fewer in Birmingham than there are elsewhere. The dominance of the ad agencies and the interpenetration of advertising and design – certainly something I hadn’t experience until moving here – produces a different kind of scene. The first year I was in Birmingham the council used McCann Eriksson to produce the design work for Artsfest which, although a big festival, really isn’t that big a design job. If you’re starting a small studio here, to a great extent you’re making up the rules as you go – there really aren’t that many models to follow.

That may sound like a negative, but it’s really not. The small studios that are here show very little conformity with one another. For every commercial agency who could happily exist in another city, there’s someone like An Endless Supply, who feel very much a product of this place, as much a part of the arts scene as design. Good. Maybe we can ignore all of the crap that goes along with that and get on with doing genuinely surprising work. I think there’s quite a bit of that happening here.

And that doesn’t just go for design. While there’s obvious pride in the history of this place, it never seems to dominate the way it can in other places – producing generations of bands, artists and designers who sound like, look like, act like the stereotype of what a band, artist or designer from that place ‘should’ sound like, look like, act like. When history is dealt with, in projects like Home of Metal, it’s done with a lightness of touch that’s refreshing. Creatively, there’s a real sense of freedom.

For me, this is most apparent than Digbeth, the perfect counterpoint to the clone town city centre. I didn’t really understand Digbeth when I moved here, but walking its streets last Friday night for the opening of The Event I was struck by just how much I’ve grown to love the place. My route from Trove’s installation at Curzon Street station to Eastside Projects, taking in Minerva Works on the way, was exhilarating, a mixture of edginess and excitement, shady characters lingering on the canal steps while others pass by, their heads marked with white circles from the frankly astounding Samekhmem performance. At one point I glanced into a doorway on Fazeley Street to the unexpected sight of a garden lit by burning torches, part of Edible Eastside’s open day. This unexpectedness makes the place. Doorways don’t usually lead to hidden gardens, people with circles crudely painted on their foreheads are usually best avoided, but there’s always the possibility of something different.

I’m in my 30s, with children and although I’ve got a relatively free hand I do still work for a company. Yet I think that being in Digbeth has changed my work profoundly. I’m a different designer from the one who first set up this studio and, I think, a better one. Of course that’s not all down to place, other factors just as important in changing my work. But the place undoubtedly helps. If I was in my 20s and without any restrictions, I think the creative potential offered by Digbeth would be amazing. Either way, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

All of which is a very roundabout way of expressing my ambivalence about the Creative City initiative, launched last week by Ed Vaizey. On the surface it can only be a good thing that we’re getting a brand new Museum of Modern Art and a Museum of Photography in Curzon Street Station, the developments forming a new public square with Millennium Point. Yet I worry that the top-down nature of the whole thing is the antithesis of what actually makes Digbeth work. I worry that the money for another big project will come at the expense of funding for the sort of organisations that genuinely make Birmingham different – the council’s already shown itself pretty adept at shifting money from smaller arts organisations to the city’s giants. I worry that the sort of people who’d axe the area’s creative industries director – Lara Ratnaraja, who’s supported virtually everyone in the city’s ‘creative industries’ at one time or another – aren’t really the sort of people we should trust to do the right thing.

Above all I worry that Digbeth will end up another branded/blanded ‘premier business and leisure destination’ like brindleyplace, rather than the living breathing thing it is. I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve read few blogs recently which have set up an opposition between Alan Fletcher and Wim Crouwel, acting as figureheads for a more general design fight between ‘cold’ modernism and ‘friendly’ traditionalism. There are a lot of interesting things to be said about this, but I’m going to leave those for now in favour of one point.

One of these logos is by Alan Fletcher and one is by Wim Crouwel. Can you guess which is which?

I’ve just walked to work through the centre of Birmingham, littered and scarred by last night’s rioting. Amidst the damage to banks, mobile phone shops and, bizarrely, a branch of Supercuts*, one thing that stood out for me was the small newsagents at the top of what will become Spiceal Street, contents strewn across the path, windows boarded up. I sometimes stop there on the way to work, nodding hello to one of the two men who run the shop as I fumble for change. Protesting against a corporation avoiding £6bn in tax is one thing, smashing up a small business trying to stay afloat in a recession something entirely different. A reminder, if one was needed, of how senseless this all is.

There’s much worse, of course. People have lost their homes and all their possessions. A Tottenham resident on BBC News told how he’d lost all the photographs of his children in the fire that devastated their home. It’s lucky lives haven’t been lost. If things continue as they are, I’m not sure how long that luck will hold.

A riot’s always always a self inflicted wound, always senseless, never justified as a political act. Mark Fisher has it right, I think, any political dimension to this is in the absence of politics, the utter abandonment of politics as the solution to anything. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t political factors which allowed this to happen. Is there anyone who honestly didn’t see this coming? Any idiot could have predicted that cut after cut to living standards, job losses, negative equity and the looming double dip, would prove a toxic mix when set alongside the constant drip of stories of bankers bonuses and corporate tax evasion. It was bound to lead eventually to something like this.

To understand something isn’t the same as to justify it. Reading the twitter reaction last night it astonished me how many people seem not to realise this. The demonisation of the rioters was such that at one stage the #birminghamriots hashtag was awash with speculation that the Birmingham Children’s Hospital was under attack – clearly someone noticed the large police presence in this area and forgot that Birmingham’s main police station faces the hospital. A couple of hundred disaffected kids out to smash some windows, throw things at the police and steal some of the consumer goods that are held up by society as the only measure of worth available to them, turned into a murderous zombie horde before our very eyes. At one stage a commentator I like and respect was condemning the rioters for not exhibiting proper working class values, on the basis of a blog post from some bloke in Middlesbrough being more-working-class-than-thou – like Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen by proxy. The number of otherwise sane people calling for the army to be brought in was unbelievable. It might help if they actually deployed all the police available before we trip over ourselves to declare martial law – 1,500 police were used in London last night, as opposed to 5,000 for the Royal Wedding.

I don’t live in Tottenham, Wood Green, Hackney or Ealing, so I’ve no idea what really caused the riots there. Similarly, while things were kicking off in Birmingham last night I was trying to get my two-week old daughter to go to sleep. What I will say is this. The Tottenham riots happened against a backdrop of recession, with the perceived injustice of a death in which the police were involved acting as the trigger. Similarly, the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots happened against a backdrop of a long recovery from recession, with the perceived injustice of a death in which the police were involved acting as the trigger. Closer to home for me, the 1991 Meadow Well riots on Tyneside happened against a backdrop of…

My mam has worked on the Meadow Well for 30 years and, when I was a kid, she used to pick me up from school and take me to work with her. These days it’s still unlikely to trouble any of the ‘best places to live’ lists, but it was really rough then. Buses stopped running there after 7 at night and there was a sense of barely contained lawlessness. My mam collects money for Provident – the Provvy – a loan company with rates only the desperate will sign up to. The Meadow Well is where most of her customers live – always has been. People deny any link between class, poverty and rioting, but it’s funny how they always start in places like this. It’d certainly be interesting to map the places with the highest concentration of Provvy loans and Cash Converters onto the the sites that have seen the most trouble.

Amidst the twitter outrage, handwringing and exhortations to #prayforlondon and #prayforbirmingham, perhaps thebestnameshavegone’s post on the East Dulwich Forum expressing concern as to the whereabouts of the writer’s Ocado delivery is more representative than we’d like to think. I read people condemning the rioters as scum and calling for rubber bullets and water cannons to be used, and I can’t help think they’re the same people who laugh at the ridiculous rates charged by people like the provvy and wonder why those who use them don’t just get a normal loan. Or the girl I overheard on a bus wondering why the homeless don’t just go and live off the land or, failing that, kill themselves. Empathy and understanding don’t necessarily imply support. It is actually possible to be against the riots without turning yourself into a Daily Mail editorial. Just a thought.

People talk about alternatives, the obvious one being peaceful protest, but when the political class are so adept at ignoring us is it any wonder when people don’t bother? Well over a million people marched against the Iraq War. Blair ignored them and took us to war anyway. After the Meadow Well riots £66m was spent on the estate – doea anyone think that would have happened if the protest had been peaceful? If we seriously want people to use ‘the proper channels’ it would help if they actually worked.

I should probably get some sort of design comment in here – this is a design blog after all – so, on a totally unrelated note, what an unbelievable fuck-up Five have made of Daniel Eatock’s Big Brother logo. It makes me so angry I could smash something.

*During the early 90s epidemic on Tyneside, an estate agents in Whitley Bay was ram-raided. I’ve no idea what they thought they were going to steal.