The Designer as Authorwithout boundaries?

The Designer as Authorwithout boundaries?

Mixing Messages+ Intertextualidade/DesconstruçãoEXE.1Ana Sofia Borges

Prof. António NicolasDC4 | FBAUL1011

diagramapp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the Author

(Roland Barthes, 1968)pp.12

What is an Author?

(Michel Foucault, 1969)pp.14

Authorship(Rick Poynor,

2003)pp.16

The Designer as Author (Rick Poynor, 1998)

pp.20

2

índice imagens

pp.36

referênciaspp.37

British Graphic Design: New Wave(Rick Poynor, 2004)

pp.22

New wave graphics: a manual of stylein Street Style(Catherine Mcdermott,

1987)pp.28

The graphic language of Neville Brody(Jon Wozencroft, 1998)

pp.32

Índice

3

Diagrama

Tomando como ponto de partida o texto eleito na fase anterior (R.3 / 1.ªfase_Leitura), The designer as author, de Rick Poynor (1998), destaca-se de imediato o tema que é tido como iniciático no desenvolvimento do trabalho que se propõe, British graphic design, encaminhando-nos de imediato para a segunda temática em discussão, o New Wave do design britânico, incidindo-se particularmente nas décadas de ’70-’80, esboçando cenograficamente o contexto que o enlaça [cultura punk].Com o movimento new wave emergente, retoma-se a discussão “secular” da importância da autoria – authorship –, principalmente no âmbito do design gráfico, tendo em consideração a função do designer gráfico, a transmissão/comunicação eficaz de mensagens, interroga-se o facto do estilo como interferência ou forma de enaltecer/evidenciar uma determinada mensagem, sem que isso corrompa o conteúdo, nem distraia o designer da sua função primeira. Posto isto serão (re-)visitados autores como Roland Barthes (The death of the author, 1968 – remetendo para questões como a importância do leitor e das suas interpretações, terminando o seu ensaio com a polémica frase “thebirth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”), Michel Foulcault (escreve, em 1969, como resposta a Barthes, What is an Author – focando as características e funções, bem como os problemas associados à questão da autoria), e Andrew Serri (Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, 1970 – mais direccionado para a realização de cinema, sendo curioso traçar um paralelo entre estes e o design, na medida em que os últimos também se dirigem a um público, necessitando de distanciar-se de si mesmos; no caso dos directores de arte, também estes direccionam a actividade de outros criativos, sendo que o resultado deve provir tanto do tratamento estético/gráfico, assim como do conteúdo). Considerando o exposto, na génesis do movimento new wave britânico encontramos como principais influências os designers:

O holandês Gert Dumbar (n. 1940, Indonésia), criador do premiado Studio Dumbar (1977), professor no Royal College of Arts (1985 - 1987), constituiu uma forte influência (europeia) nos designers britânicos desta época, destacando-se, por exemplo, os membros do Why Not Associates (fundado em 1987, por Andy Altamann [n.1962], David Ellis [n.1962], e Howard Greenhalgh [n.1963]), e Sean Perkins (da Cartlidge Levene).

Richard Hollis (n. 1934, Londres), emerge como uma das figuras mais influentes no design gráfico britânico, o seu trabalho para o jornal trimestral Modern Poetry in Translation despertou o desejo da necessidade de “energizar” o design britânico. Foi director de arte da revista New Society; criador da identidade visual para a Whitechapel Art Gallery; e autor dos livros Graphic Design: Concise History e Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965 (Poynor, 2004). Em 2005 foi eleito pela Royal Designer for Industry.

Robin Fior (n.1935) estudou inglês na Oxford University. O seu envolvimento com a esquerda política conduziu-o à impressão. Em 1955, frequentou as aulas nocturnas de tipografia de Edward Wright na Central School of Arts and Crafts, embora seja reconhecido como designer autodidacta. Em 1960, foi para a Suíça de forma a familiarizar-se com o design suíço, aplicando a sua tipografia moderna em cartazes fortes para a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s Committee of 100. Fior projectou o semanário Peace News, foi director de arte da Pluto Press e signatário, em 1964, do manifesto de Ken Garland [First Things First]. Em 1972, Fior mudou-se para Lisboa onde se juntou à Praxis (cooperativa de design). Após o golpe militar que culminou com o fim da ditadura em Portugal [25 de Abril], Fior foi responsável pela propaganda política que antecedeu as primeiras eleições em 1975. Membro

Registo Teórico

6

diagrama

pp.4 ▲

fundador da Associação Portuguesa de Designers, e colaborador na criação do Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual [AR.CO], no qual leccionou durante muitos anos. Fior nota num texto sobre o desenvolvimento da profissão de designer em Portugal, que as pressões da concorrência obrigam os designers a assumir diversas funções, anteriormente dispersas pelas oficinas gráficas ou serviços especializados como, designadamente, a tipocomposição, o retoque, e a paginação final. A facilidade e a rapidez introduzem, também aqui, a desvantagem de uma certa descaracterização da intervenção: “A facilidade de transmissão de textos e imagens por e-mail, para transformação e integração num ‘documento’ final tem, como contrapartida, a perda do tempo para pensar, afinar, acertar: o design gráfico (…) precisa de tempo” (Fior, 1999: 93; Poynor, 2004).

David King (n. 1943) designer, fotografo, editor, pesquisador e autor. Estudou design gráfico na London School of Printing, tendo sido aluno de Robin Fior. Na qualidade de editor de arte do The Sunday Times Magazine (1965 -1975), King colaborou com o director de arte Michael Rand na criação de uma nova linguagem de cariz cinematográfico para o suplemento colorido deste. Em meados da década de ’70 começou a desenhar posters para organizações como a Apartheid in Practice e a National Union of Journalists. O seu estilo gráfico colide numa mistura “explosiva” de tipografia sem serifas, planos sólidos e cores vívidas, reavivando a linguagem gráfica dos construtivistas russos para a nova esquerda britânica. Possuidor de uma extensa colecção de fotografias soviéticas [um quarto de milhão de imagens!], na qual se apoiou para a criação das suas histórias visuais [como autor e designer], incluindo a sua primeira biografia pictórica, com Francis Wyndham; Trotsky: A Documentary (1972); The Great Purges (1984); The Commissar Vanishes (1997); e Ordinary Citizens (2003) (Poynor, 2004).

A década de ’70 emerge assim como um período intensamente criativo, evidenciando-se nas várias áreas criativas (e.g., literatura, arquitectura, música, design), repercutindo-se as suas ideias/influências mais de dez anos depois, especificamente na área do design gráfico, destacando-se os trabalhos realizados no âmbito da indústria musical e/ou revistas e publicações independentes, assumindo uma resposta activa ao British Street Style e às novas culturas que se faziam sentir, nomeadamente, o Punk. Este movimento sócio-cultural surge como reacção ao marasmo da sociedade, ressentido pela recessão económica, surgindo no panorama gráfico como um contraponto às

Ken Garland director de arte da revista britânica Design Magazine, ao longo de

seis anos (1956-62), marcando o pós-guerra que anunciava uma mudança social

radical e uma explosão nas artes criativas; criando em 1962 o seu estúdio de design,

Ken Garland & Associates (KG&A); escreveu e publicou o famoso manifesto

First Things First (1964, Eye no.13, vol.4), e contribui para inúmeras publicações

(Typographica, Penrose Annual, Blueprint, Baseline e Eye); membro fundador da

British Design & Art Direction (D&AD), a par de David Bailey, Terence Dono-

van, Alan Fletcher e Colin Forbes (criador do logótipo original); criador de duas

importantes revistas, a Issue (grafismo de Cartlidge Levene), e a 8vo, que segundo

Bridget Wilkin, constitui uma revista não para ler mas para admirar. Fortemente

conhecido pelas suas opiniões, uma das quais remete para a questão do papel do

designer como transmissor de mensagens (de outras pessoas), ao invés de introdu-

zir as suas próprias, assumindo um inabalável respeito pelo cliente, remetendo as

suas mensagens/opiniões para a escrita, palestras, aulas, de forma a providenciar

canais que lhe permitam expressar as suas próprias ideias. Garland constitui assim

uma figura incontornável no desenvolvimento do design gráfico da segunda meta-

de do séc. XX, cujas experiências e ideias providenciaram insights cruciais para o

desenvolvimento new wave britânico (Eye no. 66).

Registo Teórico

7

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

▲▲

▲▲

▲▲

regras impositivas do Modernismo, numa ânsia de quebrar com o estabelecido, numa procura incessante pelo novo, o excêntrico, o chocante, desenvolvendo-se e adaptando-se, a par das angústias sociais emergentes (Mcdermott, 1987).

Aliado a este cenário surge Jamie Reid (n. 1952), designer/artista gráfico britânico, com fortes conexões Anarquistas (filosofia política que considera indesejável, desnecessário, e prejudicial o papel do Estado, procurando diminuir, ou mesmo abolir, a autoridade na condução das relações humanas) e Situacionistas (Situationist International, consiste num restrito grupo de revolucionários internacionais [fundado em 1957 e dissolvido em 1972] tendo como pico de influência as greves gerais de Maio de ’68, França; enraizando o seu ideário no marxismo e na avant-garde europeia ´20, defendiam experiências de vida alternativas às admitidas pela ordem capitalista, numa tentativa de cumprir os desejos humanos primitivos, e a busca de uma qualidade passional superior, sugerindo para tal a criação de um urbanismo unitário e a psicogeografia. A Sociedade do Espectáculo, 1967, de Guy Debord, assume-se como a obra mais influente e demonstrativa deste ideário). O trabalho de Reid, com letras cortadas de manchetes de jornal, ao estilo de “nota de resgate”, possibilitou uma maior definição do estilo Punk Rock, evidenciando-se tal nos trabalhos realizados para o grupo musical Sex Pistols (e.g., álbum Never Mind the Bollocks, e singles God Save the Queen e Anarchy in the UK), do qual era director de arte, e com direcção de Malcolm McLaren (seu colega de escola e companheiro de manifestações não violentas), surgindo este imaginário gráfico aquando da sua direcção na revista Suburban Press (revista de política radical) (Poynor, 2004).

Barney Bubbles, de nome original Colin Fulcher, (n. 1942; m. 1983), designer/artista gráfico e director de vídeo, mais conhecido pela sua contribuição gráfica no âmbito da cena independente da música britânica nos anos 70 a 80, destacando-se pelas suas capas de disco carregadas de simbolismo e mistério. Inicia a sua carreira, 1963, na Michael Tucker + Associates, incluindo clientes como a Pirelli, descrevendo-a posteriormente como “extremamente suíça”. Em 1967 decide mudar de nome, e com David Wills redesenha a revista Motor Racing, criam a revista Oz, e em 1969 cria o estúdio Teenburger Designs, realizando a capa do disco da banda Dr. Z, que se fez notar pelo seu carácter desdobrável e pelo intenso colorido. Junta-se em 1977 à Stiff Records, ficando responsável pelo corpo criativo, criando as capas para The Damned, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Dr. Feelgood e Hawkwind, sendo que muitas vezes as suas capas eram acompanhadas de logótipos particulares, como o caso dos Blockhead.A assinatura de Bubbles emerge como colorida, lúdica, carregada de geometria, criptogramas, simbolismo e referências históricas (e.g., Futurismo, Bauhaus, De Stijl), assumindo o paradoxo de uma simultaneidade, na medida em que o seu trabalho é complexo (ao nível do significado), e directo (ao nível da entrega ao leitor/espectador) (e.g, trabalhos para Elvis Costello e Ian Dury). Quanto ao seu trabalho ao nível de vídeo-clips musicais é de destacar os realizados para Elvis Costello (Clubland) e The Specials (Ghost Town). De temperamento algo instável, tendo-lhe sido diagnosticado transtorno bipolar (labilidade/transtorno de humor; variação extrema entre a fase maníaca e a fase depressiva), acabando por se suicidar. Bubbles sagra-se como uma das figuras incontornáveis do panorama do design gráfico britânico (Poynor, 2004).

Reconhecido principalmente pelos seus trabalhos de design gráfico para os estúdios 23Envelope (em parceria com Nigel Grierson [fotógrafo]) e v23 (criada em 1988, após a saída de Nigel da primeira), mantendo uma relação estreita com a discográfica 4Ad (1982 a 1998), Vaughan Oliver ficou reconhecido pelas distintas identidades visuais que criou para as bandas Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance,

8

diagrama

pp.4

The Breeders, This Mortal Coil, Pale Saints, Pixies, e Throwing Muses. Admirado pela sua energia de colaboração e imaginação, sendo que o seu impacto na indústria da música pós-punk é ainda enaltecido, a par da sua influência sobre uma geração de designers, na exploração das possibilidades dos tipos e de impressão (Poynor, 2004).

Malcolm Garrett (n.1956) estudou em St. Ambrose College e em Manchester Polytechnic (1975-78) juntamente com Peter Saville. Considera-se um dos mais inovadores designers gráficos new wave, com as suas particulares ideias acerca do uso da tipografia, distinguindo-se o seu primeiro trabalho, com maior relevância profissional, a capa do álbum para o grupo de punk rock Buzzcock (Orgasm Adict), recolhendo as suas principais influências em Max Ernest e John Heartfield. Como director de design do grupo Assorted iMaGes (1978-1994), o seu trabalho consistia na realização de identidades gráficas, exposições de design, gráficos televisivos, e design de livros, na esfera musical inclui nomes como Magazine, Duran Duran, Boy George, Simple Minds e Peter Gabriel. Nos anos ’90 Garrett foi fortemente atraído pelas tecnologias digitais, formando com Alasdair Scott a AMX digital, acabando por abandoná-la em 2001 quando esta se aliou à Zinc para formar a Arnold Interactive. Garrett é um Royal Designer for Industry, membro da Sociedade Internacional de Designers de Tipografia (ISTD), professor da University of Arts (Londres), e é o director criativo da Dynamo, plataforma/fórum interactivo on-line acerca das problemáticas do design e novos media (Mcdermott, 1987).

Peter Saville (n.1955) reconhecido pelas capas realizadas para os álbuns de Joy Division, e posteriormente ao suicídio de Ian Curtis, dos New Order. Assume a sua relevância na década de ’80, cujo trabalho é descrito como brilhante. Durante estes anos, assinou todas as capas de discos da Factory Records, da qual é co-fundador com Tony Wilson (que o introduz na cena musical em 1978), Rob Gretton e Alan Erasmus. Estudou design gráfico em Manchester Polytechnic com Garrett, recolhendo deste algumas influências (capas para os Buzzcocks), bem como de Herbert Spencer (Pioneers of Modern Typography, 1969; designer, editor, tipógrafo, fotógrafo e professor de artes gráficas no Royal College of Arts), e inspirado por Jan Tschichold (New Typography), encontrando neste uma paralelo para o New Wave que vinha a evoluir a partir do punk. Em 1979, Saville muda-se de Manchester para Londres, tornando-se director de arte da DinDisc, uma ramificação da Virgin, fazendo-se rodear de um grupo de trabalho que lhe permitisse recorrer ao Modernismo, realizando trabalhos para os Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Wham!, Ultravox e Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Em 1980, ficou marcado pela controvérsia gerada com a capa para o último álbum dos Joy Division, pouco antes da morte de Ian Curtis, apresentando um Cristo sepultado, contudo a revista New Musical Express veio comprovar a público que Saville já havia colocado várias provas de arte-final meses antes. Fundou de seguida a Peter Saville Associates, prestando serviços essencialmente para a indústria fonográfica, permanecendo ainda hoje no activo. Devido às suas estruturas tipográficas é convidado a integrar e dirigir a 8vo, e em 1990 é convidado a integrar, e a ser um dos proprietários da Pentagram (criada na década de ’60). Após a estadia em Los Angels, Saville cria com Brett Wickens o escritório de design The Apartament, no qual se dedicou a criação de identidades corporativas (até 1999). Saville alcançou o auge criativo e comercial através da consultoria em design para clientes como a Adobe, Selfridge’s, EMI, Pringle, entre muitos. Entretanto, os seus projectos mais significativos foram realizados na área da moda, para clientes como Christian Dior, Jil Sander, Martine Sitbon, John Galliano, Yohji Yamamoto e Stella McCartney, frequentemente em colaboração com seu amigo de longa data, o fotógrafo de moda Nick Knight. Em 1995, a capa de Saville para o álbum dos New Order - Power, Corruption, and Lies, de 1983, constituía um dos 25 maiores

9

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

▲▲

ícones britânicos num concurso público patrocinado pelo Museu do Design de Londres e pela BBC. Em Março de 2004, Saville foi nomeado Director Criativo da cidade de Manchester. Actualmente, os projectos de Saville estão em exposição no Museu do Design de Londres (Poynor, 2004). A partir destes dois últimos começa a ser considerada a existência de uma “segunda vaga new wave”, mais historicista e com uma abordagem mais artística (Mcdermott, 1987).

Terry Jones (n.1945; criador do logótipo do grupo Memphis) estudou na West of England College of Art em Bristol, tendo como professor preferido Richard Hollis. O seu primeiro trabalho foi como assistente de Ivan Dodd, seguindo-se a Good Housekeeping e a Vanity Fair, até chegar, em 1972 a director de arte da Vogue britânica. Terry Jones começa a interessar-se pelo street style em 1977, concebendo uma publicação denominada Not another punk book, constituindo o mais criativo livro de imagens que documenta a subcultura da época. Na Vogue, os seus colegas recusavam-se a aceitar este estilo como moda, o que culminou com a sua saída e, consequentemente com a criação da revista i-D, em 1980, cujo tema e estilo gráfico exerce uma forte influência no design editorial e publicitário. Inicialmente muito experimental, a i-D evoluiu actuando como meio de refinamento de jovens designers, jornalistas e fotógrafos. Em 1984, Jones pediu ajuda ao editor da Time Out, Tony Elliott, de modo a tornar a i-D numa revista mais comercial (Mcdermott, 1987).

Neville Brody (n. 1957) inicia os seus estudos no London College of Printing (1976-

79), sendo o seu trabalho condenado pelos professores, descrevendo-o como “não

comercial”. No ano de 1977, a cultura punk rock começa a exercer algum impacto

sobre a vida londrina, exercendo, concomitantemente, uma forte influência nos tra-

balhos de Brody (à semelhança do Dadaísmo e da Pop Art), o que não fora bem

recebido pelos seus professores, tendo sido mesmo ameaçado de expulsão por ter

colocado a cabeça da Rainha num projecto de selos postais. No entanto teve a sor-

te de poder criar cartazes para espectáculos de estudantes na faculdade (e.g., Pere

Ubu, apoiado pela The Human League, 1978), bem como para a revista da faculdade

Western Values2 (1978). Conheceu como primeiros trabalhos, enquanto designer, a

realização de capas de discos para a Al McDowell’s e para as editoras independentes

Stiff Records e Fetish Records, tendo sido nesta última que começou a experimentar

e a tornar coerente a sua tão característica linguagem visual. Brody colocou em prá-

tica o seu projecto pessoal de reintroduzir marcações humanas na arte comercial - o

seu new tribalism. Para ele, a comunicação de massas suprimira, quase que comple-

tamente, o elemento humano. A sua linguagem gráfica pretendia o oposto, tornando

- como ele explicava - o público consciente das suas atitudes e criando um design para

revelar, e não para ocultar. Porém, foi através da revista The Face, da qual foi editor/

director de arte (1981-1986) que Brody ganhou fama mundial, desenvolvendo um

trabalho experimental, que lhe permitiu revolucionar o design gráfico editorial. Ao

lidar de uma forma mais pessoal com a tipografia, desenhando para esta uma série

de fontes marcadamente geométricas (e.g., Typeface Six, 1986); de formas emble-

máticas causaram um forte impacto no mundo das artes gráficas. Brody viu a revista

como um objecto dimensionado no tempo e procurou, através da desconstrução das

formas, observar o processo orgânico de mudança de significado dos seus elementos

constitutivos. Dirigiu diversas outras publicações (e.g., City Limits, Per Lui and Lei [Itália], Ac-

tuel [França]), assim como reformulou os jornais londrinos The Guardian (no qual

a 2 de Dezembro de1988, juntamente com Wozencroft, publicou o seu Protect the

Lie) e Observer, implementando projectos de enorme qualidade técnica e ainda

assim explorando os limites da comunicação visual.

10

diagrama

pp.4

Embora tenha adoptado um estilo mais simples e elegante no fim dos anos 80, já na revista Arena (director de arte de ’87 a ’90, recorrendo à suíça e moderna Helvetica), Neville Brody reafirmou no seu trabalho The death of typography, de 1986, publicado na revista Touch, a necessidade do abandono da tipografia moderna, anunciando a entrada desta disciplina num novo campo de formas e atitudes. Em 1987, funda o The Studio em Londres. No panorama musical é de enaltecer as capas para os álbuns de Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo e Depeche Mode. Em 1988, a Thames & Hudson publica a primeira de duas das suas colectâneas, The graphic language of Neville Brody 1 e 2, adjuvado por Jon Wozencroft (n. 1958, designer gráfico, autor e professor; fundador da Touch, 1982, publicação multimédia independente, ainda activa), transformando-se rapidamente num fenómeno de vendas. Por todo o seu trabalho revolucionário, desenvolvido nesta época, Brody sagra-se assim, como um dos designers, tipógrafos e directores de arte mais conhecidos da geração de 80. Neville Brody, foi um dos primeiros designers a direccionar-se para o uso das novas tecnologias, nomeadamente com o uso da Apple Macintosh. As suas criações, verdadeiramente inseridas no movimento Pós-modernista, criaram uma ponte para o universo ecléctico que se viveu no início dos anos 90 e até para um certo revivalismo geométrico e informático no final desta década. Desta forma, no início da década de ‘90, Neville Brody passou a dedicar-se full’time à exploração das possibilidades oferecidas pelo computador. Para ele, este meio é o terreno no qual deve ser construída uma nova e necessária concepção de linguagem. As rápidas mudanças tecnológicas dos últimos anos demandam numa completa reformulação dos preceitos e práticas no design. Este projecto foi colocado em prática com o lançamento da revista Fuse (1991), dedicada exclusivamente à tipografia digital experimental, procurando promover um diálogo sobre o actual estado da tipografia e seus efeitos sobre a comunicação. Nas várias edições são publicadas fontes inspiradas em temas pré-determinados, para uso e mesmo modificação das suas formas pelos usuários. Recebendo contribuições de nomes como Erik Spiekennann, Phil Baines, Rick Valicenti, David Carson (sobre o qual é curioso mencionar o “confronto” Brody vs. Carson, em 1994 na revista Creative Review, resultando daí o título do livro de Carson, The End of Print, 1995) e Tobias FrereJones, entre dezenas de outros. Sendo de referir que a Fuse tem divulgado a mais arrojada e diversificada produção tipográfica da actualidade.Actualmente, Brody tem trabalhado no desenvolvimento de inúmeros projectos visuais para uma série de clientes em todo o mundo (e.g., Japão, Holanda, França, Áustria); juntamente com o seu sócio Fwa Richards , Brody abre as portas, em 1994, da Research Studios, agência de design baseada em Londres onde tem vindo a consolidar a sua actuação no mercado editorial e corporativo, desenvolvendo projectos para clientes internacionais. Brody aprofundou e sofisticou bastante sua linguagem visual, caracterizando-se a sua produção recente justamente pela tentativa de trazer para a tipografia digital as formas e concepções que o tornaram uma figura referencial no design dos anos 80 (Mcdermott, 1987; Wozencroft, 1998; Poynor, 2004).

Na década vidoura, ’90, é de enaltecer a importância dos grupos TomatoProject, Fuel e Why Not Associates, cujas principais influências se prendem com os designers supramencionados, tendo muitos dos membros sido alunos dos anteriores, bem como a questão da autoria partilhada sem supremacias parte a parte (Poynor, 2003). Por último, é ainda de referenciar a importância e influência dos designers new wave americanos que visitaram o Reino Unido, dos quais se destacam April Greiman e Keith Haring (Mcdermott, 1987).

11

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

▲▲

▲

The Death of the Author

The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person”.

Time , first of all, is no longer the same. The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child.

Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless.

(…) this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

12

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

(…) the reader is the very space in which are inscribed,

without any being lost, all the citations a writing

consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is

in its destination; but this destination can no longer

be personal: the reader is a man without history,

without biography, without psychology; he is only

that someone who holds gathered into a single field

all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is

why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned

in the name of a humanism which hypocritically

appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights.

The reader has never been the concern of classical

criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but

the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the

dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our

society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses,

ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore

to writing its future, we must reverse its myth:

the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.

13

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲▲

▲

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

What is an

Author?

Certainly it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of “the-man-and-his-work criticism” began. In current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author’s empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and the religious approaches.

14

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the

Author

pp.12 ▲

Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological

affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character.

Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a prod¬uct, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act—an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.

An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and

functioning of certain discourses within a society.

The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world

where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must

entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are ac¬customed, as we have seen earlier, to saying

that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an

inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men,

and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to

proliferate indefinitely.

The author is therefore the ideological

figure by which one marks the manner

in which we fear the proliferation of

meaning.

15

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲▲

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

The emergence of the «designer as author» is one of the key ideas in graphic design of the postmodernism period. It is also one of the more problematic ideas, since, as some strands of critical theory would have it, the very notion of an «author» as a validating source of authority for a cultural work is outdated, backward-looking and reactionary.

16

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

What is an Author?

pp.14 ▲

▲

Authorship“Modern art education often discourages graphic designers from actively engaging in the writing process… Instead, the graphic designer could be conceived of as a language-worker equipped to actively initiate projects – either by literally authoring texts or by elaborating, directing or disrupting their meaning. The graphic designer «writes» verbal| visual documents by arranging, sizing, framing, and editing images and texts.” (Ellen Lupton e J. Abbott Miller, 1991)

Since the earliest days of commercial art, a handful of designers had always become «stars» of the profession, their work lauded in trade magazines, exhibitions and sometimes in monographs. Nevertheless, professional rhetoric insisted, at least until the 1960s (and sometimes even today), that design was essentially an anonymous activity, and in many ways it was and still is: few members of the public would be able to name even one graphic designer. In the 1980s, as design’s sense of its own importance grew, so did its fascination with itself (…) Enthusiastic profiles became commonplace, paying as much attention to the designers’ personalities as their designs, and many books appeared celebrating individual bodies of work. A few graphic designers – Neville Brody, David Carson, Tibor Kalman – even attracted attention in mainstream media, where they were presented as significant shapers of contemporary visual culture. The tendency then, in the last 20 years, has been for graphic designers of all kinds to assert their presence and significance. Other people may view them as a group whose job is to talk a client’s message and express it as effectively as possible in a spirit of neutral professionalism, and design rhetoric has often endorsed this interpretation of design’s role. However, the motives that lead someone to become a designer have always been more complicated than this suggests. The act of designing can never be an entirely neutral process, since the designer always brings something extra to the project. A design cannot fail to be informed, in some measure, by personal taste, cultural understanding, social and political beliefs, and deeply held aesthetic preferences. The designer, as initiator or working partner, shares responsibility with the writer for the production of meaning, thought whether this is an equal responsibility a moot point. [Anne] Burdick, seemingly aware of the problems of authorship raised by Barthes and others, is careful to avoid suggesting that authorship is an attempt by designers to seize control of areas of the editorial process to which they have traditionally been denied access.

17

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲▲

In the course of the 1990s, two British creative teams, Tomato and Fuel, became identified with an authorial approach to design. Tomato, founded in 1991, was unusual in arguing that there was no essential distinction between its projects for clients and self-initiated projects by team members (Steve Baker, Michael Horsham, Karl Hyde, Jason Kedgley, Rick Smith, Simon Taylor, Dirk van Dooren, John Warwicker and Graham Wood) (…) In their first book as a collective, Process: A Tomato Project (1996),they presented a series of personal projects that flow from one to the next without explanatory labeling in the form of the titles or introductory texts, or obvious divisions between each part. There are no individual credits on the different contributions. (…) authorship is effectively shared. As a form of identity-building, this is similar to the approach taken by a more conventionally configured design company such as Pentagram. At Pentagram, projects are led by individual partners, but in the first instance the work is presented to the world as being “by Pentagram” as a collective entity (…) Shared authorship has some obvious advantages in terms of giving Tomato strength through numbers and endowing the collective’s public image with a powerful mystique, but is also confers the old-fashioned prestige of authorship on contributions that might not stand up to such consideration if examined in their own right.Fuel, founded in London in 1991, also pursued the path of collective authorship, but with certain essential differences. First, they were at pains to insist that they regarded themselves as graphic designers rather than as artists or makers of non-specific “work”, and they wanted others to perceive them in this way, too. Second, Fuel did not suggest that there was an equivalence between client work and personal work. They observed that work for clients usually involved compromises over content that need not be made in self-initiated projects. This may come down to the nature of the content itself. (…)Tomato´s imagery was often gestural or abstract, embodying an emotional mood that lent itself readily to inspirational promotional uses. (…) Fuel tended to work with hard hitting figurative and textural content that was less amenable to commercial application. Third, in Fuel’s case authorship was shared equally. The three designers (Peter Miles, Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrel) made indivisible contributions to all projects and consequently “Fuel” can be regarded as an author of a less ambiguous kind than “Tomato”, where it was often unclear who had contributed to a project. (…) Fuel employed a graphic style of brutal simplicity and directness, which, in the early to mid-1990 was completely at odds with the prevailing taste for layered, expressive typography (exemplified in Britain by Tomato) and look more like advertising.

In the 1980s, some of the most significant and influential designer|authors emerged from the genre of the artist’s book (…) they were not inhibited by the rules and codes of disciplinary (…) Their primary motivation was the expression of their own content (...)

18

The Death of the

Author

pp.12 ▲

Authorship is only useful as a term to the degree that it opens up a space for thinking about design that transcends established and possibly limited definitions.

19

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲▲

The Designer as Author

How much personal expression or additional commentary can commercial medium sustain? At what point do the codes, layers and legibility games contaminate the message beyond retrieval? New wave designers tend to justify their interventions in terms of professional creativity and originality, but for the rest of us, clients and consumers, is that finally enough?

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

▲▲

▲

For old designers, much of this new work is deeply problematic. Once, communication used to seem like a relatively straightforward affair. You found out what your client wanted to say and you expressed that message as forcefully, wittily and persuasively as possible. This being Britain, where an undogmatic, eclectic sensibility held sway, you chose whatever formal and stylistic solution seemed most «appropriate» to the client´s needs. Of course, the better you were, the more your own creative personality would shine through the project. Secretly, this might be your primary motivation. But you never lost sight of the fact that it was the client, at the end of the day, who was paying the bill.The new wave of designers pay at least lip-service to these principles. Unlike the first wave of rebels – Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville, who steered clear of the mainstream by working for the style magazines and independent record labels (…) Experience of dealing with demanding corporate clients gave the new wavers a head start when they came to set up their own business at the end of the 1980s.What critics dislike most about the new graphic design is what they claim to be its relentless insistence on style (…) This emphasis on visual styling and the precise detail of the way something looks characterizes all of the new wave designers (…) The new wavers also make a much larger assumption. They take it for granted that graphic design can function as a kind of private language, with its own vocabulary and its own set of meanings. After all, the best-selling graphic design book of the 1980s was called The Graphic language of Neville Brody.

If one faction of the British new wave absorbed its anarchism from Dumbar, then another turned to Switzerland – by way of Peter Saville’s album covers and 8vo’s Octavo magazine , first published in 1986 – for its typographic structure. Suddenly, and improbably, small sizes of Helvetica set against acres of white space looked about as fashionable as you could get. The decade wound down in a short-lived burst of enthusiasm for Weingartian stepping effects. But the sanserif aesthetic has proved, in its latest incarnation, to be remarkably durable, whether used undiluted (Roundel, Williams and Phoa), or as part of a more complex assemblage of image and text (8vo, Cartlidge Levene).

Common to all camps, though, is a renewed emphasis on the power of the photographic image, an inevitable reaction, perhaps, to the torrent of meaningless illustration that clogged the arteries of British design in the 1980s.

21

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲

▲

▲

For the most part, though, the first half of the 1970s was not a strong period in British design . The impact of the recession that began when he Arab oil producers cut supplies in 1973 could be traced in the rapidly diminishing page sizes of once expansive newsstand magazines and colour supplements. By the contrast, the emphasis in the 1970s on commissioned illustration led to an inevitable segregation of type and image, and something similar had also occurred in advertising, where text and image occupied strictly defined positions and roles. A cover design by Richard Hollis for the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, created in 1975, provides a telling reminder of the path that most British graphic design had not taken at this point. (…) Holli’s design is a dynamic graphic construction based on a carefully controlled relationship between type, image and colour, between positive and negative space, and between four repeated details derived from a photograph of a man walking his dog. This is clearly a graphic idea in the purest sense, but not one that offers up an immediate, obvious meaning. Instead, Hollis uses atmosphere, suggestion and the pleasure of unraveling the cover design’s intricate geometry to pull the viewer in. Something new was needed to re-energize British design and, once again, it was supplied by youth culture and pop music. Some of the most intriguing and memorable graphic images of the erarly 1970s were created for record sleeves.The story of 1970 punk and the new wave has been told many times, but its importance for the development of British design cannot be overstated. Punk’s anarchic spirit of self-empowerment, like that of the 1960 underground, embraced music, fashion, design, retailing, social attitudes and lifestyle. Once again, it demonstrated that culture was not simply something dished out by standard-defining “professionals” for an audience of passive consumers, but that it could be created by young people in their own way for themselves.

British GraphicDesign: New wave

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲

The music designers who emerged in the late 1970s, starting with

Jamie Reid, supplier of cut-and-paste graphic mayhem for the Sex

Pistols, the most notorious of all the punk bands, enjoyed the best of

both worlds. They were given considerable freedom, their work was

immediately perceived as being at the leading edge of visual pop

culture, yet they distanced themselves from the mundane design

business. One of the most original British designers of the 1970s,

Barney Bubbles, belonged to the same generation as [Pearce]

Marchbank [Time Out, 4th October, 1974] and shared his experience

of working for the underground press. (…) his projects for the hippie

rock group Hawkwind in the early 1970s made a deep impression

on designer-in-the-making Malcolm Garrett, and Neville Brody

acknowledge the influence of his new wave work. Bubbles was a

consummate graphic thinker able to work fluently in a variety of styles

and an accomplished image-maker, unlike many designers, who

produced sleeves for musicians such as Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and

Dr Feelgood with a playful spontaneity uniquely his own.

At the end of the 1970s, graphic design began to divide even more

clearly into separate genres of work – a fragmentation that has

consequences to this day. Sleeve designers such as Garrett, Brody,

Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver had all studied design at college (as

had Bubbles) and they might have followed the well-worn path of

becoming junior designers at established design companies before,

perhaps, in time, starting companies of their own. Oliver came

closest to pursuing this route, working for two years at Michael Peters

& Partners, where he gained experience of typography for packaging

that he would shortly turn to his own ends. The others worked for

record labels: Garrett for Radar Records and Virgin; Saville for Factory

and DinDisc; Brody for Stiff and Fetish. Slightly later, in 1983, Oliver

hitched his wagon to 4AD Records as full-time designer. For these

designers, the primary motivation was not to become detached,

professional problem-solvers, of the kind proposed by Fletcher/

Forbes/Gill, but to become fully involved in a milieu and subculture

– the music scene – which they were passionate about. They were

also concerned to break with the increasingly trite and, to them,

meaningless visual formulas of “idea-based” commercial design. For

Garrett and Saville, who had studied together at school and college,

as well as Brody, inspiration came not from the previous generation of

designers, or from that generation’s heroes such as Rand and Bass,

but from Pop Art and from the modernist typographers of the 1920s.

Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography (1969) became

their set text. As a student, Garrett took a close interest in Dada and

Surrealism; Brody looked to Dada, Oliver to Surrealism. In the mid-

1970s, while living in Ireland, Bubbles, too, had belatedly put himself

through a crash course in Cubism, Dada, Constructivism and other

20th-century art movements.

23

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲

▲

The most carefully thought-out and detailed statement of purpose came from Brody. No other young British designer of this period made such a publicity outspoken and sustained attack on the direction that design had taken. If this has tended to be overlooked in accounts of these years, it is because Brody’s work made so much of fashion, that is obscured his underlying aims. Brody showed talent as a painter and came close to studying fine art, but decided on graphic design because he felt that art was elitist and he wanted an audience beyond the galleries. (…) He wanted to reintroduce a sense of humanity and individual identity that he believed had been lost in contemporary communication, and the visibly hand-made marks and textures seen in many of his projects in the early 1980s were one way to do this. Brody criticized the misery caused by the “false representations” of advertising, rejected the problem-solving approach that he had been taugt as a student at the London College of Printing and challenged the idea of design as neutral communication.

“Communication exists on far more levels than the simple communication of an idea, but I can´t see it as problem-solving. You become a scientist, a technician, performing a service. What that does is destroy the emotion of communication, which is the thing that most lacking in the first place. Painting is not seen as problem-solving. If you approach design from the point of view of problem-solving, then essentially it is the problem that you are communicating.” N. B.

Brody chose to work in the music business because he thought that it was the only field that would offer opportunities for experimentation. Other graphic designers of his generation shared some of his assumptions, but no one else conveyed the idea so persistently, through every utterance, that design could be a vehicle for a personal point of view.Brody’s position as art director of The Face magazine, from 1982 to 1986, gave him greater visibility as a designer than any of his contemporaries or elders, and his impact was confirmed by his 1988 retrospective at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Ultimately, his example as a new kind of international design star – a role that he did not much relish – was probably at least as significant as his work.Designers had always argued that good design would sell and by the 1980sm many manufacturers and retailers were convinced. The obsession with design was so pervasive, if not neurotic, that before they were over, these years had been christened the “design decade”.Style magazines such as i-D and The Face celebrated the tastes of design-aware young people, and articles about graphic designers such as Bubbles, Garrett, Saville and Jamie Reid were all part of the mix.

24

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲

Ken Garland reflected in 1985 on the dilemmas facing a line of work which, since its origins in the late 19th century, “has been poised awkwardly between the poles of craftsmanship and salesmanship, the individual activity and the corporate activity”. For Garland, the key terms in this comparison were clearly craftsmanship and individual activity. He found it more satisfying

to deal face to face with an organization´s leaders, and if this meant his small company working for small and medium-sized clients, this was fine. Garland feared that design consultancies that would struggle most in the new, polarized design landscape

of the 1980s would be medium-sized. The disappearance of many of their natural clients, medium-sized businesses, through mergers and takeovers, would oblige them to compete against the

big consultancies for larger clients less sympathetic to their values

and ways of working.Garland, one of graphic design’s most persistent and trenchant observers over four decades, who went on the attack. In Design,

he singled out two recent magazine projects as examples of “typographic footling” (silliness or triviality). One was an issue of Issue, designed by Cartlidge Levene and published by the Design Museum, in which a matrix of decorative rules criss-cross,

the pages, lancing everything in its path. The other was Octavo, which Garland had iniatially supported, though evidently with reservations, as he now revealed: “all the incipient mannerisms that had been present from the very first issue in the 1986 had now burgeoned into monstrosities”.

For a few designers, the overwhelming triumph of design provoked a desire to purge and purify the practice and this led in

the perhaps unlikely direction of modernism. This was the decade,

after all, when post modernism became a ubiquitous buzzword and the old certainties and verities of modernism were constantly

under attack. Brody, recoiling from the way that his design had been taken up as fashionable style, particularly by advertising, opted for plain Helvetica in the pages of Arena magazine, launched in 1986. It was repudiation – though, as it turned out, only temporary – of everything that was personal, painterly, expressive and overtly postmodern about his work. We do not advocate

the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. [FTF, ‘64] 25

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲

▲

While some designers were beginning to reassess modernism, others were taking their cue from Dutch graphic design, in particular from Gert Dumbar´s work. (…) his company Studio Dumbar often entered and won the D&AD awards, giving his way of working unusually high visibility in Britain. From 1985 to 1987, Dumbar was professor of graphic design at RCA, further extending his influence.

The new generation also recognized the dangers of type-casting. They had seen how designers such as Saville and Garrett had struggled to convince clients outside the music scene that their skills were transferable. What the late 1980s designers shared with the 1970s new wavers was a belief that design could be personal, that it could be aesthetically adventurous, and that it need not conform to the dated simplicities of the graphic idea, which they regarded as patronizing and dull. For this generation, too, Pioneers of Modern Typography was a significant influence. They responded to the work’s formal daring, its dynamism and plasticity. Whether the immediate inspiration came from Weingart or Dumbar, the lineage was modernist, with its sources in the 1920s.

The late 1980s designers insisted on their right to free aesthetic expression, as did Dumbar, but other than this most of them were not trying to “say” anything through their work. They tended to explain their methods in much the same terms of client effectiveness that designers had always used, except that their sense of what would be effective was different now.

British graphic designers had not been especially quick to engage with Apple Macintosh. Americans such as April Greiman and Rudy VanderLans acquired Macs in 1984, when the computer was first launched, and immediately set about developing a computer-based graphic aesthetic. In Britain, even Brody, a vocal advocate of digital aesthetics and founder, in 1991, of the type publication Fuse, did not start experimenting with Macintosh until 1988. Although people assumed that his angular typefaces for The Face were digital productions, they were originally hand-drawn.

The new wave designers had broken the stasis in British design, opening way for evolution and a wider variety of aesthetic approaches. Now European tendencies, largely ignore for more than a decade by the mainstream, were once again exerting an influence.

26

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲

New developments in British graphic design had caused controversy since the early 1980s. Older designers, educated in the 1950s and 1960s, often viewed new wave work with bafflement, claiming that it lacked substance and was purely a matter of style. The magazines that had nurtured this approach were commonly known as style magazines and the publications such as The Face were in thrall to the idea of style as a medium of individualistic expression. Style became a public issue and even the Left had started to wonder whether it needed to dress up its political messages more stylishly. It was also true that the work of Saville, Brody, Oliver and others depended for its impact on its aesthetic qualities.

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32

▲

▲

New wave graphics: a manual of style

The late 1970s was an inten-sely creati-ve period for music and gra-phics and, ten years later, the visual ideas produ-ced then were still being absorbed and adapted into the commer-cial areas of advertising and retailing. The indivi-duals res-ponsible for creating the new graphic look operated largely within the pop music industry and in the field of independent magazine pu-blishing.

Since his tragic suicide in 1983, Barney Bubbles has become a revered figure within the record industry. A rather shy, nervy and complex personality, his eccentricities included the refusal of any publicity, even to the extent of credit for his work, and an obsessively private way of working. His work has consequently become hard to identify — a fact that has helped to conceal his major contribution to British graphics.Bubbles brought a wider perspective to the torn extemporized graphics of early punk by introducing Modernist images from the 1920s, ncluding the work of the Futurists, the Bauhaus and the De Stijl movements. This interest in Modernism was to have a major impact on punk iconography which, until then, had restricted itself to Jamie Reid’s rather abrasive graffiti style.

They shared a common creative source, in that their work was

produced in response to British Street Style and youth culture.

Punk did much to effect a turnaround from the slick, smooth

professionalism typical of British graphic design in the early

70s, which followed from economic recession. The rather safe

approach of graphics from this period, which often showed a

deference to the rules of the Modern Movement in the range

and possibilities of typeface and in the positioning of images,

contrasted acutely with the new wave of graphic design.

Despite Punk’s stance as aggressively anti-establishment

it very quickly began to affect mainstream cultural life. The

ideas behind Punk fed back into complex roots that were

not exclusively those of the street culture but were part of a

parallel and linked tradition with Fine Art. Almost immediately

comparisons were made between Punk activities and the

European avant-garde of the 1920s. Andrew Czezowski saw

his innovative club, the Roxy (…) as a contemporary Cabaret

Voltaire – the centre of Dadaist events around 1917.

The widespread recognition of these ideas and the emergence

of punk as a popular element of youth culture really began with

the creation of the Sex Pistols, who were managed by Malcolm

McLaren and dressed by Vivienne Westwood. Jamie Reid was

their art director, responsible every poster, record sleeve, T-shirt,

backdrop and handbill until the group folded in 1979. Reid’s

graphic work for the Sex Pistols became as notorious as anything

the group said or did. Ten years later, Reid is still known as the

man who put the safety pin through the Queen’s nose but his

influence on the direction of British graphic design was far more

profound. What Reid succeeded in doing is adapting the spirit of

Punk to the technical possibilities of graphic design. His design

did much to democratize the process of art and design; all you

needed was a newspaper, some scissors and possibly, a bit later

on, an airbrush. After the Sex Pistols were dropped by EMI, their

first single was an ironic contribution to the Jubilee celebration.

Using the famous Cecil Beaton photograph, Reid worked on a

number of different versions including one, which was immediately

suppressed, of the Queen with “swastika-shaped” eyes.

In 1970 Reid used a combination of art, politics and design for his

anarchist community paper The Suburban Press (…) With Reid

behind it, Punk Rock worked tactically. He created images for the

street which said something complicated in a simple way, like the

anarchy flag and the safety pin through the Queen. He combine

this with the ability to create the perfect slogan, “Anarchy is the

key”, “Do-it-yourself is the Melody”, “Cash from Chaos”, and

“Never Trust a Hippy” which, taken overall, did much to politicize

Punk and the Sex Pistols.

28

diagrama

pp.4

registo teórico

pp.6

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

▲

One of the exponents of the new style was Malcolm Garrett who established himself as amongst the most innovative of the new wave graphic designers, with very particular ideas about the use of type. Typical of his experimental approach was the cover for the Buzzcock single Orgasm Addict which used collage effects derived from Max Ernst and John Heartfield and was widely copied — especially the device of type turning a right angle. Its success helped Garrett to set up his own company, Assorted iMaGes, which, it claimed, ‘will use any style; avoids fashion, ignores trends; dismisses fads; deplores dogma; remains oblivious to politics; adores American cars; eats at McDonalds; and sleeps irregularly. Although now involved in a diverse range of projects, Garrett worked out his style designing record sleeves. His approach revalued the sleeve as a package and gave equal emphasis to the design of the front and back (a parallel to the Punk refusal to issue A and B tracks to a release). He also questioned the traditional hierarchy of information on the sleeve: giving the title and the order number equal prominence was a typical Garrett device. Garrett admits to a tremendous influence from the work of Barney Bubbles, the designer credited with popularizing a revival of Constructivist imagery. Garrett wanted to redefine the whole idea of record packaging with its emphasis on the picture cover. In parallel with this he made decorative statements from ordinary signs and elements of machinery, often using hard-edged colours (in particular blue and yellow) which gave his work a recognizable style. Garrett also worked, in an informal way, with the other important graphic stylist of the 80s, his school friend Peter Saville. Saville was awarded a first-class degree from Manchester Polytechnic and went on to work for Factory, DinDisc, Stiff and Radar – all the major independent record companies. His work is slick and technically brilliant with an eye for the nearperfect placement of type and skillful use of historical sources, from Roman lapidary letters of the first century for Joy Division, to Jan Tschichold and the Modernist aesthetic for New Order. In some ways Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville represent a kind of second wave, and the stylish historicism they represent has now seen a shift in direction to a more art-based approach.

Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson are 23 Envelope, house designers for 4AD Records and, like [Russell] Mills, Fine Art based. Their work is loose and intuitive, using rich textural effects on sleeve covers for groups assuch as the Cocteau Twins. They are always non-specific about sources but, if pushed, they reluctantly refer to literature or the work of film director Andrei Tarkovsky. They are great believers in the discovered image: they used a printer’s throwaway sheet from a catalogue for Japanese textiles for one cover and an underexposed photographic print for another. Obsessive about details, Envelope 23 are consistent from cover to inner sleeve, label and poster, with the idea that first and foremost they reflect the music above the cult of the group.

The introduction of Fine Art methods and ideas into commercial graphics clearly reflects the way in which art, performance events and new wave design have been closely related in the 80s. An influence from America is important here. In the late 70s, the introduction of Freddy Laker’s cheap air fares New York made it very accessible for a short time.

29

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32▲

Reid’s influence on punk graphics was crucial (…) for he created a visually effective style in which it was possible do to things fast and without needing heavy duty technology. Artwork came out of the studio and on to thestreet, and, in the late 1970, the punk fanzine was born.

Sniffi’n Glue was the first and most important. Started in July 1976, it folded twelve issues later. The title was taken from an album by the cult New York group The Ramones. It was put together by Mark Perry, a bank clerk, who changed his name to Mark P, in order (he claimed) to prevent the stoppage of his unemployment benefit. Mark P became the perfect reflection of Punk nihilism: his first issue opened with the suggestion, It’s not meant to be read…it’s for soaking in Glue and Sniffin’.

The biggest of these is i-D which was set up in 1980 by Terry Jones, a former Art Editor for Vogue and designer of the Memphis logo. On its side, the i-D logo resembles a wink and a smile and, given Jones’s approach, it is appropriate that a winking, smiling face has become the distinguishing theme on the cover of each issue. Jones had become interested in the idea of Street Style in 1977, when he put together the material for a publication called Not Another Punk Book, which is by far the most creative picture book on the subculture to date. The experience convinced him that British style was moving in a fresh and exciting new direction but unfortunately his colleagues on Vogue did not agree. Their refusal to accept Punk culture as fashion encouraged Jones to join a group of photographers, directors and stylists led by Flavio Luccini — ex-editorial editor of L’Uomo Vogue — to put together a new group of magazines, the first of which was Donna. When this promise did not materialize, Jones decided to launch i-D himself, using his own money and the goodwill of a group of friends, including artist/designer Alex McDowell, and the magazine’s style writer, ‘man about town’ Perry Haines. The early issues of i-D were hardly more than Punk fanzines: the text was typed, colour was rare, and the pages were stapled together by hand. However, from the beginning the magazine experimented with a new graphic style while its photographs had the authentic tone of social documentation, showing images of ordinary working-class teenagers who bought their clothes from Oxfam, Flip and secondhand stalls in Kensington market, but put them together with style. The aim was to provide a fairly basic manual of fashion and music information, with a simple and minimal editorial policy. Jones felt that the way to reflect the creativity he admired in Street Style was through visual effects rather than text. In order to achieve the “immediacy” that he wanted he numbered issues, used typewriter-face print and tickertape headlines. Jones wanted i-D to be structured as an outlet for a lot of different viewpoints from the street, “I wanted to get the concept over that we don’t lay down the rules about what you wear, the idea of «in-out» fashion”. i-D was not the only important Street Style magazine. Its main rival is The Face, owned and edited by Nick Logan, whose art direction is masterminded by Neville Brody.

30

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

▲

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

▲

Brody has emerged as the most influential typographer of the 80s, with a prolific output of record sleeves, book design, posters and magazine covers. Under his art direction The Face has been called “the most influential design magazine of the 1980s”, and “the kid’s shiniest codebook”. In 1983 it was voted the Magazine of the Year by the British Magazine Publishing awards.

The Face remains an independent, small-budget magazine with an editorial policy that covers music, fashion, design and contemporary culture in that order. It presents good quality journalism of a type largely missing in the music press (…)The Face is very different from i-D, whose deliberate intention is to suggest that a visual understanding is almost as important as traditional ‘reading’ (indeed it is almost a position of principle that the copy is difficult to read!). If i-D represents the avant garde, The Face is mainstream and has an enormous influence in fashion – editorial and typography. In this latter respect Brody’s stance is anarchic, in the sense that (like Jones) he believes typographic rules are meant to be broken. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that his ‘bible’ is Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography and his heroes, perhaps more predictably, are Rodchenko and Lissitsky. Type in The Face is certainly used in an unconventional way: headlines turned upside down, serif and sans-serif faces mixed, decorative devices thrown in and a range of detailing which included dots, squares, triangles and images from everyday life.Brody defends the intrusion of these elements as part of a very serious design philosophy. Design, for him, is not an activity separate from ordinary life; the urban images which affect our daily experience cross over onto the pages of The Face – which may explain why nuts and bolts suddenly appear.Humour is also an important part of the Brody style and his skillful experiments with typography are often used to poke fun at the pretensions of The Face. Brody is aware of the fact that a magazine representing consumer aesthetics and style élites can get totally out of hand, and he has some sympathies with alternative critiques, such as that of Dick Hebdige in an article called Squaring up to The Face. The Face, Hebdige says, “reflects, defines and focuses the concerns of a significant minority of style and image-conscious people who are not, on the whole, much interested in party politics, authorised versions of the past and outmoded notions of community. The popular and the job of picturing the popular has changed irrevocably and out of all recognition ever since the 50s.”The success of these style magazines marks an important shift in emphasis. No longer does the creative centre of London lie with the powerful ad agencies, film and television companies, publishing houses and design studios. It rests instead with these independent magazines.

31

The graphic

language of Neville

Brody

pp.32▲

The graphic language of Neville Brody

+

In 1988, ‘design’ has for many people become a dirty word, symbolising the superficiality of cosmetic solutions which show contempt for deeply-entrenched problems.

In 1988, Neville Brody is the best-known British graphic designer of his generation. His record cover designs have been flighty regarded but most of all his work on maga¬zines, notably The Face, has transformed the way in which designers and readers approach the medium. Magazines have become of even greater importance to advertising and commerce in the last seven years as carriers of con¬sumer information. Inevitably, their stylistic developments have had a direct effect on High Street shop design, on art and tele¬vision – upon every area of the visual communications industry. Brody’s graphic work has been widely imitated with scant regard for his original intentions. By 1977 Punk Rock was beginning to have a major effect upon London life and, as far as Brody was concerned, this provide the catalyst he needed. “(…) Punk hit me fast, and it gave me the confidence I needed. What really did it for me was Wire’s Pink Flag, and especially what they said at the time – that you should pursue an idea, do it, stop, then go on the next one.”Dada was ‘anti-art’ where art manifested itself as an industry without any relevance to the common man; of itself, it was prob¬ably the most artistic of any intervention this century. Futurism, its historical companion, was also influential upon Brody’s work, more for its typographic experimentation than for its philosophies and attitudes.” The work of Boccioni also inspired me. The Futurists embraced the new technology of their day, but it was more as a means of survival – in any case, they soon showed where their true sympathies lay. Marinetti, in particular, was keen to glorify Mussolini’s fascisti. Pop Art, on the other hand, whilst it was very influential on Punk, was really a commercial art and this it pro¬moted in a way that made anti-commercial images acceptable.“Pop Art was a vindication and a celebration of the commercialism that developed out of the Fifties. You would see Andy Warhol’s electric-chair sequences in the same context as the flowers, the soup-cans, and the Marilyn Monroes: his art was subversive for about fifteen minutes. In effect, he aided the homogenisation, and at the end of the day this is what made him so successful. Rauschenberg, whose work was more challenging, never reached that public. “Writing about Lichtenstein’s comic strip paintings, Hans Richter commented in his essay “Neo-Dada: The feelings they evoke in the beholder’s mind belong to the artistic level of the garden dwarf.” (…)

32

The Death of the

Author

pp.12

What is an Author?

pp.14

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

▲▲

▲

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

▲

“I want to communicate to as many people as possible, but also to make a popular form of art that was more personal and less manipulative. I had to find out more about how the process worked. The only way possible was to go to college and learn it”.

Neville Brody in the last ten years back to Dadaism and Constructivism, making connections through the magazine as a whole with the work of Barney Bubbles, Malcolm Garrett and Jamie Reid, amongst others. During the late 1970s, Punk highlighted industrial and social decay

not only through its iconography – groups being photographed outside building sites and shopping centres, for example – but with the use of xeroxes, echoed human degradation through the degradation of process: the xerox was a mechanised form of communication whose end result looked as rough and as quickly thrown together as Punk’s product. Fanzines were another part of the shift that was going on, in the way that they opened up a distribution network that did not (at the time) have to rely on multinational systems. Where this connects to, architecture is not within a traditional category; it refers to a state of mind that does not always see one medium disconnected from the other, whilst at the same time celebrating the differences between, say, photography and painting, sound and colour – categorisation, after all, exists mainly for the benefit of salesmen and social observers. As a way of illustrating one’s concern for the whole of the environment, architecture is meant more as metaphor. Categorisation, like censorship, now comes in¬creasingly before the act of transmission. By that time, the groups at the heart of Punk’s intervention were filling the racks there in a different costume. As catalysts, this is where Dadaism and Punk part company. Whatever assimilation Dadaism has undergone in the last seventy years happened to Punk in the space of about seven months. Dadaism’s greatest triumph was that it was an attitude that could always be shared, but an outcome that could never be copied. In the case of Punk, it was something nearer to the opposite; an intervention that easily passed into style, where the new protagonists need share nothing of its original intentions. The second area that had a large influence on Brody’s work can be seen in the photograms of Man Ray and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and in particular, through the diverse artworks of Alexander Rodchenko. For Rodchenko, design was a means of the artist coming between his work and the needs of his public: a design to interact. As Khan-Magomedov writes: The contradiction between experimentalism and the need to communicate with the public at large during the early Soviet years was readily perceived by Rodchenko, but he also came up with a possible solution to it. In fact, Rodchenko’s “Abstract” language can legitimately be interpreted as the expression of an unusual determination to establish a dialogue with the public, to make each operation undertaken on language itself potentially explicit, by renouncing the mediated representation of reality and by transforming the materials, immediately, into form, into a medium of communication.

33

Referências

pp.36

Language is about the fixing of boundaries and the establishment of systems, but once political, social and economic frameworks have been set up, they assume their own autonomous expression whose uncovering can often be simple (try reading the opposite into any political speech, or interchanging pronouns in any text). Again, ‘specialist’ language extends into areas which encourage their expressions to be taken for granted, with calamitous results: TV news, for example. It is the difference between the uniform itself and the many reasons for wearing one.

As we now find ourselves in an age where the dominant forms of expression project themselves not from the voice to the ear, but to the eye, design is a great deal more pervasive than is suggested by its primary function of preparing artwork for the printer, or even blueprints for an architect. Design is also a means of connecting the increasingly disparate strands of the passing age of typography, with the emergent visual age of fibre-optic technology and microfilm storage. Technology insists that all history – as seen on TV – is now recent history. When it is used to form disparate strands of information into some kind of order, design is applied too often by those who have little understanding of the different elements involved. The short-cut is all important.Design thus becomes a process of stasis and entropy, a blind attempt to defer the inevitable consequences of social and ecological irresponsibility. A parallel between the industrial revolution and the technological revolution is that both are geared to social control. As information increasingly becomes based on the language of airports and computer terminals, the role of design has never been more crucial, nor more widely abused.People now more or less expect to be manipulated, even if many are unaware of how far-reaching this process has become. When so much communication is based on economic motives rather than personal interaction, this is hardly surprising. It is all to tempting to give in to ‘the

inevitable’, whatever that is. What is missing is a sense of balance; the balance that is created from a position of critical objectivity and response, and the balance created from an equal consideration of the lessons of the past, the reality of the present, and how these will, in turn, determine the future. Anything can happen.

34

Authorship

pp.16

The Designer as

Author

pp.20

British Graphic

Design: New Wave

pp.22

▲▲

▲

New wave graphics:

a manual of style

in Street Style

pp.28

▲

Referências

pp.36

Índice imagens:

Vaughan Oliver // [v23] The Mountain Goats, “We shall all be Healed“, collage using strips of photographic prints, 2004.

Malcolm Garrett // Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks, 1977.

Richard Hollis // Modern Poetry in Translation, no 23/24, 1975.

Jamie Reid // God Save the Queen the Sex Pistols, 1977.

Neville Brody // Micro-Phonies by Cabaret Voltaire, album cover, Some Bizarre/Virgin, 1984.

Barney Bubbles // Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Radar/WEA, 1979. [guardas pormenor]

36

REFERÊNCIAS ELEMENTARES:

BARTHES, Roland - The Death of the Author [1968], in Image-Music-Text, trad. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

FOUCAULT, Michel - What is an Author? [1969], in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

MCDERMOTT, Catherine - New wave graphics: a manual of style, in Street Style: British design in the ‘80s. London: The design council,1987.

POYNOR, Rick - Authorship, in No more rules – graphic design and post modernism. London: Laurence King, 2003.

POYNOR, Rick - Communicate: independent british graphic design since the sixties. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2004.

WOZENCROFT, Jon - The graphic language of Neville Brody. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998.

REFERÊNCIAS COMPLEMENTARES: AYNSLEY, Jeremy - A century of graphic design. Hong Kong: Mitchell Beazley, 2001.

ARMSTRONG, Hellen - Design Anarchy, in Graphic design theory: readings from the field. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

CEIA, Aurelindo Jaime - Uma poética visível. Lisboa: FBAUL, 2007.

CROW, David - Left to right: the cultural shift from words to pictures. Lausanne: Ava publishing SA, 2006.

FIOR, Robin - Grafismo global e local, in Design gráfico em Portugal desde 1974, Camões Revista de Letras e Culturas Lusófonas nº 5, 1999.

HOLLIS, Richard - Graphic design: a concise history. London: Thames & Hudson, 1994

POYNOR, Rick - The Designer as Author, in Design without Boundaries. London: Booth -Cliborn, 1998.

SERRIS, Andrew - Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, in Film Culture reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.

Bruce Mau - entrevista por Steven Heller, in Eye magazine, nº38, vol.10, Winter 2000 (UK).

37

MIXING MESSAGES+ Intertextualidade/DesconstruçãoEXE.1Ana Sofia Borges

Prof. António NicolasDC4 | FBAUL1011