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Anthony Burrill Nothing comes from nowhere, 2015
Anthony Burrill’s Nothing Comes from Nowhere, 2015. All images: courtesy the artists/Kemistry Gallery
Anthony Burrill’s Nothing Comes from Nowhere, 2015. All images: courtesy the artists/Kemistry Gallery

Graphic need: it's time to bring design into the spotlight

This article is more than 9 years old

From the moment you hit your alarm clock, you inhabit a world of graphic design ... but compared with architecture and fashion, it has a whisperingly low profile. Might plans for a new national centre kick it up a few font sizes?

You are bombarded with it every day, from the moment you stare bleary-eyed into your alarm clock, to the letters on this very page. Yet graphic design is almost entirely absent from public discourse. It’s everywhere, but hidden in plain sight.

Graphic design has always been the poor relation to its more lordly cousins. Architecture has a Royal Institute, an Architecture Foundation, an Architectural Association and almost more awards lavished on the profession than there are buildings completed each year. Fashion has its own museum, its own special weeks and its attendant tomes of glossy magazines, while products and furniture take up the bulk of the Design Museum’s collection and enjoy annual festivals where chairs are put on pedestals. But graphic designers? If they’re lucky, they can pay through the nose for the chance to win a novelty yellow pencil.

“We thought it was ridiculous that although their work is seen by millions of people, all the time, the man in the street probably couldn’t name a single graphic designer,” says Graham McCallum, co-founder of east London’s Kemistry Gallery, which opened 10 years ago, driven by this very frustration. Operating on a shoestring, the small space has held exhibitions every six weeks since then, showcasing the work of established stars and unknown young designers, building up an avid fan club along the way. Just before Christmas, they were forced out of their Shoreditch home by rising rents. Now they’re back, with more ambitious plans than ever before.

Zero per Zero’s New York City, 2010

“One option was to call it a day after a good run,” says McCallum, whose energy belies his 71 years. “But we had so many people on Facebook pleading with us to carry on, and so many school groups asking when the next show was going to be, we had to stick with it.”

After receiving a £15,000 grant from the Arts Council for a feasibility study, and the same amount again from a Kickstarter campaign, McCallum and Kemistry co-founder Ricky Churchill are now planning nothing less than a new National Centre for Graphic Design.

“We can’t get there in one leap, but the Photographers’ Gallery is the model we’re thinking of,” says McCallum, describing a centre with space for a standing exhibition as well as temporary shows, a place for lectures and of course a shop, where graphics fetishists might drool over the latest bindings and fondle foiled covers. Keen to stay in east London, they are currently working with Hackney council to identify a space. This may be further east in Hackney Wick, on the edge of the imminent Olympicopolis cultural quarter, making use of residential developments’ requirements to be seen to be “giving back” to the area.

A temporary snapshot of what such a space might look like opens this weekend at Protein Studios, with an exhibition ambitiously titled 100 Years of Graphic Design. Essentially a best-of retrospective of designers McCallum and Churchill have showed over the last decade, it brings together unlikely bedfellows in one big room for the first time.

There is the original hand-painted version of Max Gill’s fantastical Wonderground map, produced for the London Underground in 1914, alongside Ken Garland’s CND protest posters from the 1962 Aldermaston march, its ban-the-bomb symbol layered like a marching line of placards. There is David Pearson’s recent Penguin cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four, its title dramatically blacked-out like redacted NSA files, beside a map of the New York Subway emblazoned on a big red heart, hand-drawn by young South Korean studio Zero per Zero.

Max Gill’s Wonderground, 1914

“We found Zero per Zero on the internet one day,” says McCallum. “That’s where we bump into new talent now. But it needs physical space, too. It’s nice to bring this work to people, and show graphic design as something that has a value – not just a commercial enterprise.”

It is an eclectic mix, ranging from a Saul Bass film poster (mass-produced in the 1960s, but now worth up to £3,000), to the street-art letterforms of Ben Eine, known for plastering the alphabet across roller shutters in the East End. In a slightly different moment of commodification, his work has gone from being thrown-up by night to a presidential trophy: one of his canvases was recently presented as a gift from David Cameron to Barack Obama.

It’s an impressive feat to have rallied all this stuff together, much of it donated from the designers themselves, including pieces from New York duo Milton Glaser (creator of the original I ♥ NY) and Seymour Chwast, both now in their 80s and still practising. But it is even more shocking that such a show should be a rarity – indeed, McCallum can’t remember anything like this in his lifetime.

“There’s an increasing awareness of graphic design, but it’s only grown recently,” he says. “It used to be quite an arcane profession: you used scalpels and cardboard and cow-gum and prepared artwork. What has changed is the digital revolution, which has really democratised design. Anyone can do it now,” he grins, “and unfortunately they do.”

But with the digital shift, hasn’t the way design should be exhibited also transformed? Is the future of a National Centre for Graphic Design really about hanging prints on walls?

Eine’s Extortion, 2014

“There is a danger it could all be very nostalgic,” says Neville Brody, dean of the school of communication at the Royal College of Art, who defined the radical look of The Face in the 1980s. “Graphic design is undergoing massive changes. The old model of print and branding has almost disappeared. Brands are using social media to connect directly with their audience and packaging is just the thing something comes in off the internet, it’s not what you pick off the shelf.”

To stay relevant, he thinks the centre must engage with other disciplines and tackle bigger issues like sustainability and social engagement, not fetishise the work of a bygone era. “I would hate to see a celebratory museum,” he adds. “But I would love to see a great British crafts institution helping to define the future.”

Others see an urgent need for a more thorough appreciation of graphic history, as well looking forward. “There is a difference between nostalgia and understanding history,” says John Morgan, whose own work for clients from the BBC to Tate Britain draws on a masterly understanding of what has gone before. “Students just aren’t taught history any more and it really shows.”

He thinks the issue stems partly from graphic design’s relative youth. “We had commercial artists, but the first practising design groups weren’t until the 1950s and 60s,” he says. “It’s still such a young discipline that no one knows what the hell it is. There’s no critical backstory. Anything that helps graphic design to stop being the poor relation of architecture should be encouraged.”

Adrian Shaughnessy, founder of Unit Editions publishers and senior tutor at the RCA, sees the problem as a British affliction. “We don’t have the same graphic tradition as Switzerland, Holland or even the US,” he says. “If you evaluate graphics in fine art terms, it’s always been seen as a low-grade activity here, denigrated as a commercial endeavour. It wasn’t until the 80s that we took these people seriously. But it really is changing now.” Thousands of international students apply to study graphic design in London every year, he says, ahead of New York and Amsterdam. And they’re more keen on print than ever before.

Ken Garland, poster for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1962
Ken Garland’s poster for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1962

“The digital revolution? A few years ago I would have said so. But now all of our students want to work in print. The digital thing is obviously huge, but there’s a whole new culture being built around printed artefacts. The letterpress workshop has never been so busy.”

There are few models elsewhere in the world for what a national graphic design centre might look like, leaving the Kemistry duo starting from scratch. Tokyo has the excellent Ginza Graphic Gallery, while the French town of Chaumont has an annual poster festival that has spawned a centre for graphic design. But there is precious little else, bar the collections of major museums.

“Chaumont is an interesting example,” says Benjamin Reichen, of London-based design studio Åbäke. “They’re planning a mini-Tate of graphic design in the French countryside. What a weird, brave thing to do.”

He thinks such an institution hasn’t existed before partly because the work can be problematic to exhibit. It doesn’t really fit in. “Graphic design is a form of support structure,” he says. “It’s always attached to a context or client. How do you focus a programme around something that is not really a standalone thing?”

This existential angst is precisely what can be hammered out in the new forum: a place for print nerds to debate with virtual futurists, for bookbinding to be interrogated with the same critical rigour as a new cat meme, for the rich and ragged melee of visual culture to be celebrated and disputed on a public stage. Whatever the National Centre for Graphic Design becomes, it can be sure to have an eager audience champing at the bit. In fact its first events have already sold out.

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