Prior to the global economy being chucked into the deep fat fryer, it was commonplace to read in the glossy interiors and architectural magazines about £250,000 kitchens. Readers were treated to beautifully art directed picture spreads showing sleek metropolitan types cooing over marble work surfaces and industrial-sized hobs. But as a dazzling exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum reminds us, the fetishisation of the kitchen isn’t new.

There’s an image in the ‘Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970’ exhibition at the V&A that shows it wasn’t just the space race and the arms race that were the battlefields of the Cold War. The 1950s kitchen, with its Formica surfaces, washing machines and labour-saving appliances, was one of the more unlikely staging grounds for the ideological battle that raged between East and West. In an unforgettable photograph taken at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon are seen shoulder to shoulder, gazing at a modern fitted kitchen. They have such serious-browed expressions that they might be surveying the arsenals of weapons that both superpowers were amassing.

Photograph by William Saffire, 1959. Source: nyti.ms/16DI6Zd.

It’s tempting to think that as the world shivered under the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the humble kitchen with its utopian promise of the end of drudgery was really what the Cold War was all about.

It’s just one of hundreds of images and artefacts on show at this most engaging exhibition. ‘Cold War Modern’ is a bravura melding of political history and design history, and provides a ringside seat to that white-hot moment when the world changed faster than it had ever changed before. The exhibition celebrates the transformation of the developed world from the machine era into the era of space travel, scientific discovery and mass produced technological goods. And it tells us that it is the design of buildings, products and clothes, as well as the art of the time, that defines this era best. This was the first time that design was the defining characteristic of the age. If we think back to the Victorian era, design was something that only the rich could enjoy. Later, with the modernists, it was for the avant-garde. But here was design that had freed itself from the yoke of formalism and the aping of natural forms. Here was design that could be enjoyed – and used – by everyone. Here was design that offered a utopian sense of universal enfranchisement. And it is astonishing to think that this design revolution was made possible by the same technological and scientific revolution that produced the atomic bomb. Annihilation and salvation in the same package.

What ‘Cold War Modern’ shows is that artists, designers and engineers working under the tension of the nuclear threat produced work of visionary daringness. It suggests that the creative spirit, to perform at its best, needs a dizzying mixture of opportunity and fear. Perhaps, as we face our own equivalent of the postwar nuclear nightmare – ecological disaster – a new design vision will emerge to get us through it.

‘Cold War Modern’ is brilliantly curated (by Jane Pavitt and David Crowley) and brilliantly designed (by Universal Design Studio with graphics by Bibliothèque). It made me nostalgic for the future. It made me want to go back to the future. It looks like a much better place.

–
First published in Design Week, 4 December 2008.

Choosing only ten records is a kind of torture. If I could choose 500, I might begin to get close to expressing my musical taste. So, I’ve decided to select individual records that represent a strand – or genre – of music that I go back to repeatedly. But ask me tomorrow, and I’ll give you a completely different ten.

United States of America – United States of America

Dreamy surrealistic pop from the 1960s. Curiously undated and featuring the sort of collagist approach to music making that we take for granted today. It’s full of psychedelic guitars, wan vocals and gurgling electronics. Leader Joseph Byrd was a pioneer of electronics in pop. If you like bands such as Broadcast and Stereolab – well, this is what they’ve been listening to.

Biosphere – Cirque

I listen to lots of non-vocal electronic music. There are a few dozen CDs I could have chosen from this genre, but I’ve gone for the chilly poetics of Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere). It’s electronic music that doesn’t rely on beats for its impact. If you travelled north of the Arctic Circle and lay down with your ear next to the ice, this is what you’d hear.

Neu – Neu 2

This is the opposite of the Biosphere record. It is monotonous, industrial pop, propelled by nail-gun beats and intoxicating drones. It sounds like the soundtrack to a long drive on an autobahn in a fast car. I could have chosen Kraftwerk, but there’s something about the monotony of Neu that makes them darker and more dangerously addictive.

Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Most people love her early singer/songwriter work, but I can’t get too excited about that era. Something happened to her in the 1970s, though, and The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a near-perfect blend of sophisticated jazz pop with visionary lyrics about being alive – but detached – in 70s LA. Prince’s famously cited this as one of his favourite records.

Jandek – Manhattan Tuesday

You can clear a room with the Texan dronist’s off-kilter music. Personally, I can’t get enough of his out-of-tune voice and spectral drones. Listening to him is like stumbling into a ghostly Pentecostal church in the Texas badlands in a film by Terrence Mallick. This is music from the outer reaches. Jandek has made dozens of records, but this is one I play often. Especially if I want to be alone!

David Sylvian – Manafon

Any record that mentions the austere Welsh poet RS Thomas is OK with me. I’ve liked Sylvian since his first solo albums, and here he pushes deeper into atonal territory, working with improvising musicians and Eraserhead-type electronic scrapings. Music that gets down to the bone.

Miles Davis – Get Up With It

I love Miles from all eras and in all his incarnations, but I’ve chosen this less well known record from 1974. He is one of the great artists of the 20th century, and a shining example of a creative genius who never stopped moving, evolving and kicking down barricades.

Throbbing Gristle – The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle

As I get older I appreciate TG more and more. This is music from the realms of psychological pain, but I always find it cathartic and life-affirming. And with titles such as ‘Slug Bait’, ‘Maggot Death’ and ‘Zyclon B Zombie’, I don’t think we are supposed to find it life-affirming. As the album cover says – industrial music for industrial people.

Brother Ah – Move Ever Onward

Radical black music from the 70s is an obsession of mine. I toyed with choosing a Sun Ra record, but plumped instead for Brother Ah from 1975. He fuses jazz, Indian music, Oriental temple chimes, flutes and African percussion with recitations of spiritual poetry extolling black consciousness and political transcendence. 

Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

This is a sparkling mash-up of fragments of musical language that emerges as something entirely modern and cohesive. I can hear references to soul, funk, Hollywood movies and arcade games – all within a few bars. Mutant music for a mutant world. 

–
First published in It's Nice That #4, October 2010. 

John Berry and Martin Aitchison produced illustrations for the Ladybird series of learn-to-read books in the 1960s and early 1970s. The studied realism of their paintings, especially Berry’s frequent depictions of Britain’s nascent technological revolution, was a departure from the patriarchal and often saccharine tone of children’s book illustration. Berry and Aitchison depicted a nation on the cusp of profound cultural change: a nation about to get modern.

A recent exhibition in London of their Ladybird work has excited a nostalgic reappraisal of these two octogenarian artists. A generation of British children were weaned on their work, and amongst many British designers and illustrators, Ladybird books from this golden era enjoy an unrivalled cachet. It’s not hard to see why. They are beautiful things: typographi­c­ally sophisticated, and bristling with a laudable social and pedagogical intent. They were conceived by writer and teacher William Murray as a tool for the promotion of literacy. A note to teachers and parents spelt out their purpose: ‘The full-colour illustrations have been designed to create a desirable attitude towards learning – by making every child eager to read each title. Thus, this attractive reading scheme embraces not only the latest findings in word frequency, but also the natural interests and activities of happy children.’

For anyone who grew up in the late-50s or early-60s, the appeal of Berry and Aitchison’s work today is principally nostalgic. But even for those born later, the duo’s work captures a widely recognisable moment in recent British history: the transformation of Britain from a dowdy, war-ravaged country, into an affluent, technologically-enabled modern state. In 1964, the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously spoke about a new Britain forged in ‘the white heat of technology’: Berry and Aitchison recorded this transformation in their Ladybird illustrations. They were the Norman Rockwells of 1960s Britain: for sizzling turkeys and home-made apple pies, substitute automated car factories and police cars next to high-rise blocks; for mawkish over-romanticizing, substitute emotional detachment. The writer Michael Bracewell sees comparisons with more modern figures; he correctly likens their work to the ‘claustrophobic portraiture of Sam Taylor-Wood, or the enigmatic Englishness of Martin Parr’s photography.’

John Berry studied at the Royal Academy School of Arts in the 1930s, and had a distinguished career as a society portrait painter. He painted Lady Astor, the young Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Diana, Princess of Wales and George W Bush. But he also worked in advertising, and this manifests itself in what Bracewell calls the ‘visual immediacy’ of his Ladybird illustrations. It is said that Berry ‘could do anything, provided he had a photograph to work from.’ You can see this in his sparsely elegant portrait of a railway worker: the man dominates the frame in a way that is clearly influenced by commercial photography. He has the demeanour of an airline pilot, and in his uniform, with its hint of Pierre Cardin-like modernity, he cuts a strikingly modern figure. Behind him we catch a flash-frame of contemporary railway architecture; it is new and sharp, and has doubtlessly replaced a piece of crumbling Victoriana. Berry’s paintings look like an advertising campaign for Harold Wilson’s ‘white hot’ new Britain. There’s nothing messy or distracting in his world; everything is hygienic and clean. To contemporary eyes, accustomed to the advertiser’s view of a sanitized and wart-free world, it is a surprisingly modern vision.

But Berry stops short of ad land spin: he always retains an element of Anglo-Saxon restraint; his skies are an optimistic blue, but they are not cloudless, they have a familiar grey-tinged turbulence that renders them authentic. His painting of two policemen in a car is like a still from a 1960s new-realism British TV cop show. These are modern policemen, not the friendly Bobbies traditionally encountered in children’s literature. They are anonymous bureaucrats keeping order in a modern metropolis. A modern building, an office block, looms over them. It is white and clean and surrounded by strategically planted trees. Berry’s best work records the rise of a new Britain created by town planners and urban developers. In another painting, an eerie depiction of a car descending into an underground car park, no human beings are present and the car appears driverless. It is an almost Ballardian view of modernity, and I was reminded of Paul Valery’s remark that nothing is as mysterious as clarity.

In contrast, Martin Aitchison’s work is less technologically-focussed; it is cosier, more humanistic, but no less revealing in the way it captures the rhetoric of life in 1960s Britain. Aitchison studied in Birmingham and at the Slade in London. He planned to become a painter, but as he noted in a recent interview, ‘After the war, my attitude changed, and I began illustration and advertising as a freelancer.’ He was employed by the publishers Hulton as a contributor to the popular children’s comic The Eagle (1950–69), where he illustrated Luck of the Legion.

Aitchison shares Berry’s visual immediacy, but their styles are different. You can see it in their handling of policemen. In Berry’s hands they are shadowy Robo-cops, while under Aitchison’s gentler scrutiny, they become benign public servants anxious to please. In one of Aitchison’s scenes a youngish copper instructs an attentive girl in road safety. Behind him another policeman bundles a drunk into the local police station, while others go about their civic business calmly. In another painting, a friendly motorcycle cop with leather gloves and an implausibly neat uniform, talks to some children. They are by the seaside and the impression is of a scene from an Enid Blyton story. Compared to Berry’s techno Britain, Aitchison’s Britain is still cloaked in the pre-war hegemony of traditional patriarchal values.

Aitchison worked from real models rather than photographs. It shows in his two portraits of children investigating family heirlooms. The first of the two paintings was done in the mid-1960s, the second in the early-1970s. Profound changes have taken place in that short period. In the former scene the children are dressed in the clothes of bourgeois certainty. They look like the children from the 1945 film Brief Encounter: the girl is dressed as a mini-version of her mother; the boy in the middle-class uniform of shorts, white ankle socks and T-bar sandals. But by 1972, when the later portait was painted, both children are dressed in the casual attire of youth. They wear dungarees and trainers, and they both look more confident and less reverential as they sift through family relics.

Looking at Berry and Aitchison’s work, forty years after it was first published, we see the beginnings of political correctness, we see mild attempts at social engineering, and we see a new honesty and realism in the images presented to children. But we also see history. As we increasingly become a society of the visual, and because we have come to mistrust the authoritarian lessons of history, we turn to the footprints of popular culture and mass imagery for our understanding of the world. Berry and Aitchison’s Ladybird work seems as effective as photography, television programmes, films and historical texts in its depiction and illumination of a period in our recent past. In some ways, it is more illuminating, because it deals with life, work, play and childhood in a realistic and largely unpatronising manner. Their work allows a generation to interpret its collective past, without the sentimental fudge that accompanied children’s literature since the Victorian era.

–
First published in Eye 52, Summer 2004.

Vaughan Oliver
Minotaurs in suburban England [1]
– 

A chic café next to the Royal Festival Hall on the banks of the river Thames, London. It’s mid-afternoon and Vaughan Oliver is talking about blood, sex and death. He pulls photographs from his bag like doves from a magician’s hat. It’s the work of the 4AD dream team, united again; photographer Simon Larbalestier and designer Vaughan Oliver.[2] They are working on a collector’s box set of five Pixies albums: a loving homage to the Boston rockers. No new songs, but all the artwork and imagery is new.

Larbalestier has been living in Thailand. It shows in his pictures. He has been patrolling the murky zones of sex, religion and body politics. We look at sutures, crucifixes and shards of indeterminate anatomy. His images of eroticised Catholicism have a newfound Oriental inflexion. Plaster saints in terrifying close-up; bleached bones; Bangkok sex-tourist neon.

Oliver lives in Epsom, Surrey. Suburban England. Home of insurance brokers and people who make the daily half-hour trip to London on crowded, commuter trains. Unspeaking, they read newspapers and dream of retirement and long days of golf in damp English afternoons. Epsom is a long way from Thailand; it’s a long way from Oliver’s native Durham in the coal-hard northeast of England; it’s a long way from Boston, Massachusetts.

Oliver says proudly that the Victorian artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley lived in Epsom. Beardsley is the patron saint of English weird. The first superstar of English graphic art. A consumptive who coughed blood into his handkerchief and saw his own death in the red stigmata on the white linen. Dead at 26.

Oliver produces more pictures. He spreads them out on the café table: a tabletop movie of dark beauty. The staff in the café, who have accents from France and Eastern Europe and probably have university degrees in difficult subjects, glance at the images; a waiter with dreadlocks piled up on his head, does a double take. A Pixies fan? A Vaughan Oliver fan? But he doesn’t linger. He looks away and serves brownies and tea to people with time to kill before attending afternoon poetry readings or Gamelan workshops at the Royal Festival Hall.

Vaughan Oliver explains his new role as art director and image editor. A grandee of graphic design now, he has others do the work while he watches and edits. Under his attentive gaze an army of student helpers, many of them born after the release of arguably the Pixies’ most famous album, Surfer Rosa, work with Oliver to forge a new Pixies’ iconography. He watches, ever vigilant for the happy accident or the unintended collision, as the typography for all five Pixies 4AD albums is warped, twisted and distressed and as entirely new styles and forms emerge from the eager hands of his students.

Pixies, Surfer Rosa, 4AD, 1988. Arguably the most famous Pixies LP cover. Art direction and design by Vaughan Oliver.

Oliver, the wizard of the image-meld, pushes Larbalestier’s photographs up hard against ghostly fragments of Pixies’ graphic mythology. Pictures of abandoned gloves and rosary beads (stills from an imaginary Tarkovsky movie) are slammed against a new Pixies visual lexicon created by the students.

But why a book? Why a box set? Why all this physical-world matter? After all, we live in the age of the audio download – a super-convenient data stream of invisible ones and zeros that arrive in our laptops, cell phones and iPods within seconds of being summoned. No waiting. No hanging about in record shops. No browsing through inky music papers. No delayed pleasure. Only instant demand and instant gratification. All the music we ever need held in a zippy piece of 21st century product design smaller than a cigarette packet. Soon we’ll have an implant in our brains and all the data in the world will be streamed into our heads, where it will float about like the messages heard by clinically insane serial killers. But why a book? Why a box set? Why all this physical-world matter?

Because we love the real world touch of paper, ink and cardboard. Because you can’t scratch an MP3 file; it never gets dust on it; it never develops the patina of age. Even some of my CDs, bought in the first wave of digital technolust of the 1980s, have turned tobacco yellow. But an MP3 file? It’s just audio vapour. A keystroke away from deletion.

A Pixies box set is like experiencing them playing live. It has heft and dimension. You can feel it. You can touch it. Like Minotaurs in Epsom, it’s real. Not imagined.

–
[1] In 2009, I met the designer Vaughan Oliver to discuss writing a short text for inclusion in a deluxe Pixies box set called Minotaur. Oliver didn’t like my text, and it wasn’t used. It was subsequently published on Design Observer. 

[2] 4AD, an independent British record label with a cult following, founded by Ivo Watts-Russell in 1979. Vaughan Oliver was responsible for the majority of 4AD sleeves. Many of the photographs were taken by Simon Larbalestier.

–
First published on the Design Observer, 9 November 2010. 

On the night, Ken Garland gave an inspiring talk, followed by a conversation with Unit Editions co-founder Adrian Shaughnessy. We were there to promote our title Ken Garland: Structure and Substance, published in December last year. 

Ken Garland signing posters designed for
the occasion 

Ken was his usual self: a master storyteller and genuine crowd pleaser, charming the audience with his life-long passion for design (and the occasional curse word). Most graphic design speakers show slide after slide of final outcomes, but Ken always remains humble and apologetic for showing his own work, focusing instead on the many people he has learned from, and the collaborators he has worked with throughout the years.

Ken is known for moving about the audience

Adrian Shaughnessy in conversation with Ken

Ken shared some helpful (and memorable) aphorisms: 'Don't try to be your own boss from the start – make mistakes at someone else's expense', 'Logos are made for friggin' about with' and 'Develop your skills and sell them at a good rate to great clients'. 

We thoroughly enjoyed the night and the great company of the LongLunch crew. The next event, also in Glasgow, features Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset, on Thursday June 20th. Tickets on sale soon: www.longlunch.com.

Left to right: Ken Garland, LongLunch's Andrew, Richy and Ryan, and me

The politics of desire and looting
–

The riots that ripped through English cities during four days in August were more ferocious and catastrophic than similar outbursts in the recent past. They have caused a prolonged and unprecedented bout of soul searching amongst all strands of British society. How could this happen? What caused it? Who is to blame?

Blame has been heaped mainly on the cuts-obsessed, expenses-fiddling politicians; on the Metropolitan Police who inadvertently triggered the rioting by shooting a man in the street; on the nation’s underfunded education system; and on city councils who rushed to close youth centres in the wake of the cuts in social funding imposed as a result of the global economic crises.

Opprobrium has also been directed at the parents of rioters (special venom is reserved for single mothers – the great bogey figures of the British right-wing press); at role models in entertainment and sport; at the despised and greedy bankers; even British rappers have had accusatory fingers pointed at them.

One group has so far escaped blame: designers. Hardly surprising – who could possibly think that we mild-mannered individuals are somehow responsible for murder, theft, arson and civil disobedience on an apocalyptic scale? And yet, a salient feature of these riots has been the fact that the main target of the attacks has been the shops of the major retail brands of British commercial life.

In previous modern-day riots, the aim has been to expose grievances relating to social injustice. And although the young of multicultural urban Britain have many genuine social grievances, on this occasion they made their objective the acquisition of free stuff.

The principal target was a highly successful chain of shops called JD Sports. It sells fashionable street wear. Other popular targets included mobile phone shops, electrical goods stores, and outlets of leading UK fashion brands. All these shops spend huge amounts of money on branding, on store layout, on window displays, and on slick advertising. Their ads leap at us from newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and the Internet.

Celebrities endorse their products. They are little shrines of desire. Despite one or two gleefully publicised cases, the majority of the rioters came from poor homes in the least desirable, least well-resourced areas of England’s major cities. They come from places with low achievement rates in education, and where employment prospects are low.

These young people are not poor in the sense in which we understand poverty in the undeveloped world. They have Blackberrys (the encrypted Blackberry messaging system was used extensively to coordinate attacks), fashionable jeans, and cool footwear: but they are poor enough to have a sense of being excluded from the great orgy of consumer acquisitiveness that is flaunted in front of them daily.

Specifically, they are excluded from the world of unfettered acquisitiveness created by the brand owners, advertising agencies, art directors, graphic designers, photographers, product designers, retail designers, architects, stylists, retouchers, and copywriters at work in modern Britain.

I’m not advocating a puritan revolution. I don’t want to ban advertising, or return to the bad design that characterised British shops in the 1970s – they were brown, musty, and unwelcoming. Nor do I think a single designer has ever gone to work thinking, ‘Today I must create something that drives the underprivileged youth of modern Britain mad with desire and envy.’ 

But for the past three or four decades the major role of graphic design has been to create the branding and collateral of desire. For those who can afford entry into this world – no harm is done. For those who can resist the blandishments of this world – no harm is done. But for those who have neither the education nor emotional maturity to deal with this, immense harm is done. 

Some designers have been warning about the unwanted side effects of the design revolution, most notably Ken Garland. As far back as 1964, he launched his ‘First Things First’ manifesto; and more recently, designers such as Jonathan Barnbrook and the supporters of Adbusters have issued similar caveats.

These warnings are often mocked as  ‘idealistic’ and ‘naive’. But from now on, it’s going to be hard for critics to dismiss them. There really is a price to pay for creating the seductive tropes of modern commerce. We’ve seen what happens when you create a beautifully manicured world of desire, and then say to a big chunk of the population, no entry. Seductive design is emphatically not the main cause of the riots, but it is a contributing factor, and we’d be dishonest to deny our part in it. 

What is to be done? Interestingly, for some time now, I’ve watched the emergence of a generation of design students and young designers who don’t want to become the agents of commercial seduction. They are looking for a new role – one where social value is the new capital, not the sales charts of brand owners. Suddenly, they seem like the only acceptable future for design.

–
First published on Design Observer, 15 August 2011.

Among its 24+ speakers are old-timers Ben Bos and Bob Bill, the next generation’s Vaughan Oliver and Louise Fili, to twenty-somethings Kate Moross and Hvass&Hannibal. The second room will host a series of ‘conversations’, e.g. Oliviero Toscani with Steve Heller; ‘routes into’ design, illustration and photography; and debates on topics such as ‘is there such a thing as an Irish voice in design?’

Unit Editions co-founder Adrian Shaughnessy will present Herb Lubalin’s work on Sunday 7 April at 5pm. He will also converse with Louise Fili on Friday 5 April and with Vaughan Oliver on Saturday 6 April, both at 1pm. 

Tickets go for £130 (student/unwaged) or £195 (general) for the three days, or £50 (student) or £70 (general) for a day ticket. You can buy them here.

www.iloveoffset.com
@weloveoffset

All images from the Offset website.

News on the next Unit Editions title coming soon... Keep an eye on our website, twitter and facebook pages.

You have exchanged several memorable letters with some of the greatest designers of the century, did these friendships with designers from all over the world influence your view on design?

My four heroes in design and life are Alan Fletcher, Milton Glaser, Jorge Frascara and Armin Hofmann. They taught me everything they could. It took me years to understand their teachings.

Top: Irineo Leguisamo by Ronald Shakespear, 1966. Right: detail of a letter from Armin and Dorothea Hofmann

I remember Milton's visit to Buenos Aires. He said to my students: 'Learn all what you can from your teachers now and when you cross the street, please forget it all'.

The Society of Environmental Graphic Design gave me the opportunity to share honours with Massimo [Vignelli], Lance [Wyman], Robert Venturi, Ivan Chermayeff, Deborah Sussman, David Vanden-Eynden, Chris Calori, among others, and awarded me in 2008 with the SEGD's Fellow Award. It is one of the most important recognitions in my life. Awards never changed my life. Nevertheless, it is good for a Latin American designer to be placed on the world map.

Here's a nice brief story written by my son Lorenzo:

'The design consultancy founded by Ronald Shakespear started as a solo act 50 years ago. You may need some facts and information about Argentina and its history (say, about the past 60 years) to understand why this is relevant.

Its origin as a classic Graphic Design studio helped to shape the origin of the profession in Argentina and the region, rendered the word design a meaningful word in a place where it had no clear meaning and inspired generations that now speak for themselves making Argentina a landmark in the design map.

By the standards of the days when Ronald initiated his studio, there was little or no information at all about graphic design as a professional practice. Argentina, as always, kept its eyes on Europe more than anywhere else, and Ronald was no exception to this. Meeting Alan Fletcher (relationship that flourished with the pass of time) in the times of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, as well as the work of Jock Kinneir, the German masters (Aicher, Müller-Brockmann, Hoffmann et al), Milton Glaser, Ivan Chermayeff and Paul Rand among many others in New York, shaped and consolidated a vision but, above all, confirmed an intuition. Still, the lack of formal training and the possibilities of Argentina presented a young designer with a problem unimaginable today. This deficiency may actually have been the key.

Ronald went out and observed Argentina himself. “Design solutions for Argentine problems” he used to say, drawing and writing his own conclusions based on what he saw. He made hypotheses about what he found and experimented with typography, photography, illustration, cinema and different materials to test his ideas. The ratio of perception of design, he realised, had as main requirement to offer an absolutely clear visual structure which allowed the viewer to have access to the information and to the “intangible” values of the event, convincingly. A sign is not a panel with images, figures and words. Signs are instruments of information, identity and stimulation. That line of thinking applied to everything.

Apart from my grandfather suggesting him to pursue a middle education at the Raggio technical drawing schools - which he never finished - his involvement with the visual arts, design and culture are a product of his own creation. Somebody said that an artist is somebody who has invented an artist. We could extend this to design more than ever.

There was no such thing as a design school in those days in Argentina. Advertising was obviously his first stop in the creativity business.

In those days Argentina was a melting pot of ideas and the Di Tella Institute, as well as the parallel cultural outbursts, were this side of the world's version of London's swinging 60s. You could spit on the floor and some idea would immediately grow from that. He always cites Juan Carlos Distefano as a seminal point in his life. Probably because he brought the German and Swiss masters to his attention. But Ronald is really a blender in the most culinary of terms (we are a food oriented kind of family). So many things happened in that period, so accute were his powers of observation and understanding, and he must have been so deep into it that his self invention was inevitable. That paved the way for him to lift off and by the time the dizzy advertising industry realised that something odd was happening with him, he was already a free bird. He never ever stopped since.

The 30 or 40 years that followed are a lesson of storming energy and talents, a vision, an impossible list of obstacles and possibilities that the so called first world will never understand, and an ability to make things happen regardless of what he calls "the impeding machine". Like we say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Each work assignment built new variables to his capacity of response. Anybody living and working in South America will undoubtedly relate to this.

You have to understand, though, that all this wasn't instrumental in his self creation as a design hero in the egotistic glory of the designer-star concept. It was instrumental in his vision of survival".

Argentinian graphic design is doing well at the moment - Estudio Tricota, Design Has No Name and Lia Martini are just a few names that we have come across recently. How do you feel about the design scene in Argentina?

It’s not certain that Argentina has a tone of voice of its own nowadays. Nobody has. Globalisation has covered all the world. Buenos Aires became Unesco’s Design City in 2005 due to phenomenal design production after the 2001 crisis which made the country cave in and we are learning now how to come from the back yard.

Young studios are naturally fighting for a place under the sun. Many of them are very, very good. But we work in a different way. We don't work for clients. We work with clients. Some call us to design a boat, while what they really need, is to cross the river. Alan used to say, 'What are you going to give to your client? What he expects or what he never dreamed he'd receive?'

You were Chair Professor at the University of Buenos Aires – is teaching still a part of your practice?

I love teaching. Giving is a precious gift. I left my Chair at the University of Buenos Aires many years ago, but I still talk for students in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, China, North America and Argentina. I think I'll give it up sooner or later because I hate planes and airports. Flying is for birds.

You've had several exhibitions, e.g. at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Triennale di Milano and National Fine Arts Museum in Buenos Aires. Do you have any exhibitions planned for the future?

Despite the importance of Centre Pompidou, I remember with nostalgia our exhibitions at the Katzen Art Center in Washington and at the Richmond AIA house as the most complete and memorable. When we showed our work there, some experts asked how we managed to convince the authorities of the need of public interventions in the urban landscape of the city.

I have been invited to put together an anthological exhibition in April, at the Museum of Modern Art (Mamba) in Buenos Aires and a tiny one of my photographs called 'Revisiting the Sixties'. I am looking forward to both.

Spreads from Revisitando los Sesenta/Revisiting the Sixties by Ronald Shakespear

What do you consider your most enduring piece of work?

I love works people love. And I hope future generations will do better than I did. I have always started from intuition. The method, research, the process come later, in order to verify that intuition. We also have a certain way of 'accessing information' as Saul Wurman would say. Darwin’s theory was known long before he was, but – obviously – with the conviction that a divine hand had done it all. Einstein said that it is not possible to make an observation unless the observer has a theory to apply to what he is looking at.

In 1975 Harrods London sold its Buenos Aires branch to a local investor and he entrusted me a new logo.

Harrods logo, designed in 1975

For a long time, I was friends with a Catholic priest named Father Duncan. He was Irish, and I think what brought us together was basically our afternoon gin and tonic, as we played cards in the backyard of his church. One day he told me that the cross on the top of the church could not be seen by people, and he suggested that we put up a neon light cross. I naturally told him that he was drunk. Christian grammar does not admit neon lights. The cross is a unique symbol, and has been built in hardwood, bronze, iron, gold, or marble, yet never in neon, a technology associated with show, nightlife or amusement. But he made it happen anyhow. A pink neon cross. We all thought it was a scandal. A few years later, as I flew back from the North, I ran into an old friend who was a pilot, and I asked him to allow me to join him in the plane’s cockpit for landing. As the plane reached a certain point, the pilot went straight for the local airfield – which was 14 kilometres away. I asked him how he knew that was precisely the place. He said: 'I know because I can see the Sign of God over there'. And there it was indeed, Father Duncan’s pink neon cross. Father Duncan was right.

If design does not help people to live better, it's not good
at all.

After a short introduction by the book's author Adrian Shaughnessy, Ken Garland ‘took to the stage’ (he is famous for delivering his lectures while moving amongst the audience). He talked briefly about his time as a student at Central School of Arts and Crafts, feeling 'the delight of discovery' and his joy in trying to represent movement in a still image.

A student excerise by Garland from Edward Wright's evening classes in experimental typography

The slide show that followed presented images of work from the start of his career in the 1950s, through to the end of Ken Garland and Associates in the 1980s. What could have been a self-centred delivery turned into a homage to Garland's teachers, collaborators, associates and clients. Out of respect for this humble gesture, here is the full tribute:

Edward Wright (typography teacher)
Nigel Henderson (photography teacher)
William Slack (editor, Architectural Review)
Herbert Spencer (teacher and publisher)
John Garner (photographer)
Harriet Crowder (photographer)
Brian Grimley (art editor)
Ivor Kamlish (designer, model for Garland's photography)
Paul and Marjorie Abbatt (first real clients, toy makers)
James Galt (owner of Galt Toys)
Eric Smellie (designer)
Daria Gan (designer and illustrator)
Ruth Garland (daughter, ‘model’ and illustrator)
Robert Chapman (first associate)
Ray Carpenter (second associate)
Malcolm Quantrill (client and ‘model’)
Wanda Garland (wife)
Norman Moore (associate and illustrator)
Peter Kneebone (illustrator)
Gill Scott (designer)
Peter Cole (designer)
Richard Marston (designer)
Phil Sayer (photographer)
Colin Bailey (associate)
Anna Carson (designer)

The designer Ivor Kamlish, photographed by Ken Garland for a spread in Design magazine

Garland's daughter Ruth (second from right) playing with her friends at a photoshoot for Design magazine

Ken’s lecture was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Shaughnessy. The panel consisted of: Anne Odling-Smee, Garland's student at Reading University; Fraser Muggeridge also a student at Reading under Garland, who now invites him to be part of his yearly Typography Summer School; Richard Hollis, who met Garland in the 1950s when the latter was working on banners for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Mafalda Spencer, who has known Ken Garland her whole life – her father Herbert Spencer was a friend of Garland’s; and finally Ray Carpenter, Garland's second studio associate.

The panel provided many insights into Garland's teaching (how he treats each student as an individual and makes him or her feel special); his design practice (how it's important to communicate the client's message and not your own, to draw influence not just from graphic design but everything around you); his unforgettable lectures (how he fired a starting pistol to get attention or took his trousers down); his attitude towards collaborating designers (how he treated them as equals instead of assistants, and how he placed enormous trust in them – Ray Carpenter remembers being left to run the studio on his own while Garland went on a three-week holiday with his family).

The evening showed why everyone that has ever met the man has a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for him. Keep hold of those signed monographs, they're precious. 

–
Ken Garland: Structure and Substance by Adrian Shaughnessy – the first complete monograph of Ken Garland's work.