The designer as author. without boundaries?

The Designer as Author without boundaries?

The Designer as Author without boundaries?

Mixing Messages + Intertextualidade/Desconstrução EXE.1 Ana Sofia Borges Prof. António Nicolas DC4 | FBAUL1011

diagrama pp.4

registo te贸rico pp.6

What is an Author?

(Michel Foucault, 1969) pp.14

Authorship (Rick Poynor, 2003) pp.16

The Death of the Author (Roland Barthes, 1968) pp.12

The Designer as Author (Rick Poynor, 1998) pp.20

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Índice índice imagens pp.36

referências pp.37

The graphic language of Neville Brody (Jon Wozencroft, 1998) pp.32

New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style (Catherine Mcdermott, 1987) pp.28

British Graphic Design: New Wave (Rick Poynor, 2004) pp.22 3

iagrama

Registo Teórico

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, destacandose, 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).

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diagrama pp.4

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.

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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

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The Death of the Author pp.12 What is an Author? pp.14 Authorship pp.16

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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

The Designer as Author pp.20

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).

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ign Magazine, ao longo de arte da revista britânica Des Ken Garland director de va uma mudança social ncia anu que ra guer pósoo seis anos (1956-62), marcand o seu estúdio de design, 2 196 em ndo cria ; ivas artes criat radical e uma explosão nas u o famoso manifesto lico pub e eveu escr ); s (KG&A Ken Garland & Associate inúmeras publicações para ui trib con e ), no.13, vol.4 First Things First (1964, Eye membro fundador da ; Eye) e line Base t, ual, Blueprin ey, Terence Dono(Typographica, Penrose Ann Bail id Dav de par a ), ction (D&AD ); criador de duas British Design & Art Dire inal orig tipo logó do Forbes (criador 8vo, que segundo a e van, Alan Fletcher e Colin , ene) Lev e tlidg e (grafismo de Car irar. Fortemente adm importantes revistas, a Issu para mas ler uma revista não para do papel do stão que Bridget Wilkin, constitui a para ete rem iões, uma das quais de introdus invé ao , conhecido pelas suas opin oas) pess as de mensagens (de outr etendo as rem te, designer como transmissor clien pelo eito do um inabalável resp idenciar prov a a zir as suas próprias, assumin form de s, aula para a escrita, palestras, i assim suas mensagens/opiniões rias ideias. Garland constitu próp suas as r essa expr metacanais que lhe permitam do design gráfico da segunda ento lvim nvo dese no l o uma figura incontornáve ciaram insights cruciais para iden prov as idei e cias riên de do séc. XX, cujas expe 66). no.

(Eye o ânic brit e desenvolvimento new wav

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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).

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regras impositivas do Modernismo, numa ânsia de quebrar com o estabelecido, numa procura incessante pelo novo, o excêntrico, o chocante, desenvolvendose 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).

diagrama pp.4

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).

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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,

The Death of the Author pp.12 What is an Author? pp.14

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).

The Designer as Author pp.20

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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 artefinal 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

Authorship pp.16

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 online acerca das problemáticas do design e novos media (Mcdermott, 1987).

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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).

diagrama pp.4

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

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Brod 79), send y (n. 1957) inicia o o seu tr os seus es tudos no ab comercial Lo ”. No ano alho condenado pelos pro ndon College of sobre a vi de 1977, Printing fessores, da londri a cultura (19 des n p a, exerce balhos d ndo, con unk rock começ crevendo-o com 76e Brody o “não a co (à a exercer mitantem recebido semelhan al pel ente, um ça do D a forte in gum impacto adaísmo colocado os seus professo fluência ed re a cabeça nos da Rainh s, tendo sido mes a Pop Art), o qu te de po e não fo traa nu der mo ra bem Ubu, apo criar cartazes par m projecto de se ameaçado de ex p lo iado pela a The Hum espectáculos de s postais. No en ulsão por ter Western tan estudante an Leagu Val e, 1978), s na facu to teve a sorrealização ues2 (1978). Co bem com ldade (e.g nheceu co d op ., mo prim Stiff Rec e capas de discos eiros trab ara a revista da facu Pere ord par alhos, en e a tornar s e Fetish Record a a Al McDowel quanto d ldade l’s e para s, tendo si coerente esigner, a as editora do nesta a sua tão tica o seu s in últ ca projecto pessoal d racterística lingu ima que começou dependentes seu new ag e a trib reintrodu em visual experimen . zir marca tamente, alism. Para ele, a ções hum Brody colocou em tar o el co anas na ar prá- como el emento humano municação de m te comer assas sup e explica . A sua lin cial rim va gu revelar, e não para o público conscie agem gráfica prete ira, quase que co - o mp n ocultar. P ndia o op director orém, fo te das suas atitud de osto, torn lei atra es e an trabalho arte (1981-1986 ) que Bro vés da revista Th criando um desig do experimen n e dy ganho ta lidar de u fama m Face, da qual foi para uma form l, que lhe perm editor/ itiu revo a mais p de fonte lucionar undial, desenvolv essoal co sm od endo um m a tipo máticas ca arcadamente geo grafia, des esign gráfico ed métricas usaram u itorial. A enhand (e.g m forte im como um o pacto no ., Typeface Six, 1 o para esta uma ob série mundo d 986); de formas, o jecto dimension as ad fo bservar o rm ar o n te as o s te gr em m áfi processo bleconstituti cas. Brod orgânico po e procurou, at vo y viu a re ravés da de mudan vista Dirigiu d s. desconst ça de sign iversas o ru çã ificado d utras pu tuel [Fra os seus el o das bli nça]), as ementos sim com cações (e.g., City a 2 de D o reform Limits, P ezembro u lou os jo er Lui an de1988, Lie) e O rn d Lei junta ais lo bse assim exp rver, implementa mente com Woze ndrinos The Guar [Itália], Acncroft, p lorando dian (no os limites ndo projectos d u qual b li co u o seu P e enorm da comu ro e qualid nicação vi ade técn tect the sual. ica e ain da

The Death of the Author pp.12 What is an Author? pp.14 Authorship pp.16 The Designer as Author pp.20

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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).

British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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 prédeterminados, 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, caracterizandose 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).

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The Death of the Author

diagrama pp.4

registo teórico pp.6

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”.

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

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.

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What is an Author? pp.14

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Authorship pp.16

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The Designer as Author pp.20

(…) the reader is the v withou ery sp t any b ace in eing lo consis which st, all th ts of; th are ins e citati cribed e unity o in its d ons a , f a tex estinati w riting t is no on; bu be pers t in its o t this d onal: th rigin, it estinati e read is withou on can er is a t biogra no lon man w ger phy, w that so it h out his ithout meone tory, psycho who h all the logy; h olds g paths e is on athere of whic ly d why it in to a sin h the te is absu gle field xt is co rd to h in the nstitute ear the name d. This new w of a hu is appoin riting c manism ts itself ondem which ned the ch The re hypoc ampio ader h ri tically n of th as nev e read criticis er bee er’s rig m; for n the c hts. it, there o n the on cern o is no o e who f class ther m writes ical dupes a n .

W in e are n literatu no lon ow be re but ger of society g such a inning proudly ntiphra to be th champ ses, by ignore e ions p s, smo which re thers o our c is e to writi ly r destr what it ng its oys; w dismis future, e know ses, we mu that to st reve restore rse its myth:

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

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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 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.

diagrama pp.4 14

What is an Author?

registo teórico pp.6

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The Death of the Author pp.12

“the-man-and-his-work criticism”

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.

The a uthor is th figur erefo e by re th w h i e ide ch on in wh ologi e mar ich w cal ks th e fea meani e r m t anner he pr ng. olife ratio n of

Authorship pp.16

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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

British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22 New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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.

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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 Designer as Author pp.20

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.

The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32 15

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What is an Author? pp.14

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The Death of the Author pp.12 registo teórico pp.6 diagrama pp.4 16

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.

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:

British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22 New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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.

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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

The Designer as Author pp.20

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.

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The Death of the Author pp.12

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 (...)

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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.

The Designer as Author pp.20

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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.

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Authorship pp.16 diagrama pp.4

registo teórico pp.6

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The Death of the Author pp.12

What is an Author? pp.14

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?

The Designer

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

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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.

New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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).

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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 bestselling graphic design book of the 1980s was called The Graphic language of Neville Brody.

British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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

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The Designer as Author pp.20 Authorship pp.16 What is an Author? pp.14 The Death of the Author pp.12 registo teórico pp.6 diagrama pp.4

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 Graphic Design: New wave

British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

s, starting with emerged in the late 1970 The music designers who for the Sex hem may hic grap e past andJamie Reid, supplier of cutthe best of yed enjo s, band punk of all the Pistols, the most notorious was iderable freedom, their work cons n give were They both worlds. ing edge of visual pop lead the at g bein as d immediately perceive dane design themselves from the mun culture, yet they distanced the 1970s, of s gner desi sh t original Briti business. One of the mos e generation as [Pearce] sam the to nged belo , Barney Bubbles ed his experience October, 1974] and shar Marchbank [Time Out, 4th cts for the hippie proje his (…) s. pres und of working for the undergro impression deep a e mad s the early 1970 rock group Hawkwind in y Garrett, and Neville Brod olm Malc g akin he-m on designer-in-t e work. Bubbles was a wav new his of ence acknowledge the influ a variety of styles er able to work fluently in consummate graphic think gners, who desi y man e unlik , e-maker and an accomplished imag and as Ian Dury, Elvis Costello such s ician mus for ves produced slee uely his own. uniq ity tane spon ful play Dr Feelgood with a divide even more graphic design began to At the end of the 1970s, tion that has enta fragm a – es of work clearly into separate genr Brody, designers such as Garrett, ve Slee day. this to consequences ied design at college (as stud all had r Olive han Peter Saville and Vaug worn path of t have followed the wellhad Bubbles) and they migh panies before, com gn desi ed s at establish becoming junior designer e es of their own. Oliver cam pani com ing start , time perhaps, in Peters for two years at Michael ing work e, rout this closest to pursuing hy for packaging grap typo of e rienc expe ed & Partners, where he gain rs worked for to his own ends. The othe that he would shortly turn lle for Factory Records and Virgin; Savi ar Rad for ett Garr ls: record labe r Slightly later, in 1983, Olive h.

Fetis and Stiff for y and DinDisc; Brod designer. For these ime full-t as ords Rec hitched his wagon to 4AD detached, ivation was not to become designers, the primary mot her/ the kind proposed by Fletc of ers, solv lemprob professional e in a milieu and subcultur lved invo fully me beco Forbes/Gill, but to about. They were te iona pass were they h – the music scene – whic and, to them, with the increasingly trite also concerned to break gn. For a-based” commercial desi “ide of ulas form al visu meaningless ther at school and college, toge ied stud had who Garrett and Saville, ious generation of n came not from the prev as well as Brody, inspiratio Rand and Bass, as such es hero ration’s designers, or from that gene of the 1920s. hers grap typo the modernist but from Pop Art and from me Typography (1969) beca ern Mod of eers Pion ’s Herbert Spencer interest in Dada and e clos a took ett Garr their set text. As a student, m. In the midto Dada, Oliver to Surrealis Surrealism; Brody looked put himself bles, too, had belatedly Bub nd, Irela in living e 1970s, whil r Constructivism and othe a, Dad ism, Cub in se through a crash cour nts.

20th-century art moveme

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The Designer as Author pp.20

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 problemsolving 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.

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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.

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

[FTF, ‘64]

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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.

New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

Ken Garland reflected in 1985 on the work which dilemmas fac , since its or ing a line of igins in the poised awkw late 19th ce ardly betwee ntury, “has be n the poles salesmansh en of craftsman ip, the indivi ship and dual activity For Garland and the corp , the key term orate activity s in this com craftsmansh ”. parison were ip and indivi clearly dual activity to deal face . He found it to face with more satisfyi an organizat meant his sm ng ion´s leaders, all company and if this working for clients, this small and m was fine. Ga edium-sized rland feared that would str that design uggle most consultancie in the new, of the 1980s s polarized de would be m sign landsca edium-sized. many of their pe The disappe natural clien arance of ts, medium mergers an -sized busin d takeovers, esses, throug would oblig big consultan h e them to co cies for large mpete again r clients less and ways of st the sympathetic working. to their value Garland, on s e of graphic design’s mos observers ov t persistent er four deca an d trenchant des, who we he singled ou nt on the at t two recent tack. In Desig magazine pr “typographic n, ojects as ex footling” (sillin amples of ess or trivia of Issue, de lity). One wa signed by Ca s an issue rtlidge Leve Design Mus ne and publi eum, in which shed by the a matrix of the pages, lan decorative ru cing everyth les criss-cro ing in its pa which Garla ss, th. The othe nd had iniat r was Octav ially suppor reservations o, ted, though , as he now ev ide ntly with revealed: “a that had be ll the incipien en present fro t mannerism m the very fir now burgeo s st issue in th ned into mon e 1986 had strosities”.

For a few de signers, the overwhelming provoked a triumph of de desire to pu sign rge and purif the perhaps y the practic unlikely direc e and this led tion of mod after all, wh in ernism. This en post mod wa s the decade ernism beca and the old , me a ubiqu certainties an ito us buzzword d verities of under attack modernism . Brody, reco we re constant iling from th been taken ly e way that his up as fashio design had nable style, opted for pla particularly in Helvetica by ad vertising, in the pages launched in of Arena mag 1986. It was azine, repudiation only tempo – though, as rary – of ever it tu rned out, ything that wa expressive an s personal, d overtly po painterly, stmodern ab out his work .

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The Designer as Author pp.20

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.

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 typecasting. 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.

26

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.

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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.

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

diagrama pp.4

registo teórico pp.6

The Death of the Author pp.12

What is an Author? pp.14

Authorship pp.16

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The Designer as Author pp.20

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

New wave graphics: a manual of style

28

rk was in that their wo ative source, youth culture. a common cre d d an are yle sh St t ey Th h Stree th ponse to Britis the slick, smoo produced in res naround from to effect a tur in the early ch n sig mu de did ic nk ph Pu h gra r safe typical of Britis sion. The rathe professionalism onomic reces en showed a lowed from ec fol oft ich ich wh wh s, d, 70 s perio ge phics from thi ment in the ran approach of gra Modern Move , the rules of the ing of images to ion sit ce en po fer the de and in design. es of typeface ic liti ph ibi ss gra po of d ve an new wa nt utely with the ti-establishme contrasted ac gressively an ’s stance as ag ral life. The nk ltu Pu cu ite am sp tre De t mains re began to affec roots that we it very quickly into complex re part of a Punk fed back d we t hin bu be re as ltu ide eet cu diately those of the str Almost imme not exclusively with Fine Ar t. ked tradition s and the lin itie d tiv an ac lel nk ral Pu pa tween saw were made be w Czezowski comparisons 1920s. Andre t-garde of the orary Cabaret mp nte co a European avan (…) as club, the Roxy und 1917. his innovative ist events aro ce centre of Dada d the emergen Voltaire – the these ideas an of ion nit og ad rec lly began with rea re ltu cu The widespre of youth lm pular element naged by Malco of punk as a po s, who were ma the Sex Pistol mie Reid was Ja d. oo stw the creation of ienne We hirt, dressed by Viv ord sleeve, T-s McLaren and ery poster, rec , responsible ev 1979. Reid’s in d de fol their art director up gro ything handbill until the notorious as an backdrop and tols became as for the Sex Pis known as the ll sti is id Re graphic work later, t his or did. Ten years een’s nose bu the group said through the Qu the safety pin n was far more sig de ic ph man who put gra itish irit of direction of Br adapting the sp influence on the ded in doing is n at Reid succee sign. His desig de ic ph gra profound. Wh of lities u hnical possibi d design; all yo an art of Punk to the tec ss proce later mocratize the d possibly, a bit did much to de me scissors an ir newspaper, so ed by EMI, the pp dro re we needed was a s Pistol . . After the Sex ee celebration bil The late 1970s Ju the to on, an airbrush n ibutio on a s an ironic contr was an inten, Reid worked first single wa n photograph diately ous Cecil Beato ich was imme sely creatiwh e, on Using the fam ing lud ent versions inc ped” eyes. ve period for ha a-s tik number of differ as h “sw n for his the Queen wit music and gralitics and desig suppressed, of tion of art, po id ed a combina ss (…) With Re phics and, ten Pre n rba In 1970 Reid us bu e Su the unity paper Th ated images for years later, cre He . anarchist comm ally tic tac the Rock worked simple way, like the visual a in ted behind it, Punk lica comp ine id something een. He comb ideas produQu the gh street which sa ou thr d the safety pin “Anarchy is the ced then were anarchy flag an perfect slogan, d ility to create the m Chaos”, an still being fro h as “C this with the ab y”, lod liticize ourself is the Me absorbed and did much to po ll, era key”, “Do-it-y ov en tak Hippy” which, adapted into “Never Trust a Sex Pistols. the commerPunk and the Since his tragic suicide in 1983, Barney Bubbles has become cial areas of a revered figure within the record industry. A rather shy, nervy advertising and retailing. and complex personality, his eccentricities included the refusal of any publicity, even to the extent of credit for his work, and an The indiviobsessively private way of working. His work has consequently duals resbecome hard to identify — a fact that has helped to conceal his ponsible for major contribution to British graphics. creating the Bubbles brought a wider perspective to the torn extemporized new graphic graphics of early punk by introducing Modernist images from the look operated largely within 1920s, ncluding the work of the Futurists, the Bauhaus and the De Stijl movements. This interest in Modernism was to have a major the pop music impact on punk iconography which, until then, had restricted itself industry and to Jamie Reid’s rather abrasive graffiti style. in the field

of independent magazine publishing.

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.

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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.

The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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.

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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The Designer as Author pp.20

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 thestreet, and, in Sniffi’nto Glue was the first and most important.

Started in July the late 1970, the fanzine was born.

1976,punk 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.

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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.

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The graphic language of Neville Brody pp.32

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.

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graphic +The language of

The Death of the Author pp.12

What is an Author? pp.14 32

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Authorship pp.16

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The Designer as Author pp.20

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

Neville Brody

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 anticommercial 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.” (…)

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

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, During the late 1970s, Punk highlighted industrial and social decay amongst others. not only through its iconography – groups being photographed

“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”.

Referências pp.36

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.

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New wave graphics: a manual of style in Street Style pp.28

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British Graphic Design: New Wave pp.22

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The Designer as Author pp.20 Authorship pp.16 34

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.

ReferĂŞncias 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]

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REFERÊNCIAS ELEMENTARES: BARTHES, Roland - The Death of the Author [1968], in ImageMusic-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).

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MIXING MESSAGES +

Intertextualidade/Desconstrução

EXE.1

Ana Sofia Borges Prof. António Nicolas DC4 | FBAUL1011