Critique: All mouth and trousers?London designers show how little theycare for the poster formPublished on Sunday, 17 January, 2010 | 11:18 am

A few months ago, writes Rick Poynor, I was asked by the Design Museum to writea chapter on graphic design for a book entitled Design in Britain (Conran Octopus,October 2009). Wish I’d had the chance, while I was working on it, to see theposters commissioned by the London Design Festival’s founder, John Sorrell, andPentagram’s Domenic Lippa for the festival in September 2009. The twenty A1images were displayed at the V&A for a short time and are now available as limitededitions from Blanka. Created by leading British designers and studios, they providean unusually concentrated opportunity to see where British graphic design is now.

One issue the posters raise immediately is the question of form. This is a subject wedon’t talk about much any more in relation to graphic design. To focus on formsuggests a concern with visual appearance and style, and this is much too flimsy andself-indulgent beside weighty matters such as process, strategy, identity andbranding. These are the issues you can discuss with a client, not frivolous aesthetics.

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Above: Jonathan Ellery, Browns. Below: Alan Aboud, Aboud Creative.

But the poster, long an endangered undertaking in Britain’s graphic culture, is aninflexible taskmaster. Four sides defining a big empty rectangle: that’s all there is.The unchanging aim is to fill the space with something surprising, memorable andvisually original that communicates effectively to its intended viewers. The exerciseis hard in the way that writing a really good poem or pop song is hard, requiringcondensed visual thought, and the poster’s fabulous history of invention makes iteven harder. Add to that the challenge, in this case, of no real client, no clearlydefinable audience, and being entirely responsible for the poster’s content and pointof view.

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Above: Bibliothèque. Below: Matt Willey, Studio 8.

Below: Tony Brook, Form.

Designed in a palette restricted to red and black, the screen-printed posters made astriking collection as a set – the medium is inherently alluring. The first thing theyshowed, though, is that lack of practice has taken an inevitable, perhaps irreversibletoll. Many of these designs aren’t posters by any traditional definition. They aremorsels of graphic playfulness stretched unusually large. Pieces by Bibliothèque,Matt Willey and Tony Brook are more like enigmatic diagrams: the notionalaudience seems to be other designers rather than any plausible public. QuentinNewark’s plain typographic homage to the Robert Brownjohn era struggles to fill thespace, as does Derek and Fred Birdsall’s single-word salute to their postcode (N1).Nice they enjoy the area, but for the non-partisan viewer, there’s not a lot to thinkabout.

Below: Andy Altmann, Why Not Associates.

Only two projects feel entirely at home with the assertive demands of the streetposter: Andy Altmann’s absurdist ‘Cor-blimey trousers’ jest (courtesy of LonnieDonegan) imposed on an Evening Standard latest edition poster (above); and AlanKitching’s ‘Taxi!’ (below), the sole image that convincingly expresses London’s

Kitching’s ‘Taxi!’ (below), the sole image that convincingly expresses London’sexcitement, although that was surely one of the project’s more obvious tasks. Youcan hear the clash and clamour of the streets in the explosive arrangement ofletterpress type, and the energy of the graphic treatment more than redeems theobviousness of the subject matter.

Above: Alan Kitching, The Typography Workshop.

While graphic design has always traded in the already familiar (less charitably, inthe cliché), the choice of subject matter here is often predictable. Piccadilly Circuscomes up a couple of times, London Underground twice, London buses three times,and even the pigeons rate a couple of mentions. Fuel’s amiable pest – some kind ofcomment on the City’s moneymen? – cocks a snook at us with an ‘I (splat) London’(top).

Below: Frith Kerr.

Here, again, the project that milks the cliché most vigorously proves the mostdiverting: Frith Kerr’s eccentric setting of Ian Dury’s version of ‘The Bus Driver’sPrayer’ (above) is easily the warmest, wittiest, most durable idea of the bunch,though is it really a poster? For that matter, is Nick Bell’s initially confoundinggraphic representation of the seventeen ‘lost’ rivers of London (below), where thevertical red strokes stand for the Thames? Poster or not, the refusal to settle for atrite, tourist’s interpretation puts this project in another league.

Above: Nick Bell, Nick Bell Design. Below: Mike Dempsey.

I also admired Mike Dempsey’s willingness to cast aside the restraints ofprofessional decorum and broach the problem of prostitution (above). No one elseis anywhere near this impassioned and provocative. Why hide it away in the smallprint?

If the London posters are representative of the best graphic design in Britain, thenwe seem to be stuck in a collection of ruts. These pieces were created for a high-profile festival in a city that often proclaims itself a world leader in design, yet there

profile festival in a city that often proclaims itself a world leader in design, yet thereis nothing here that could be acclaimed in such terms. Circumscribed thinkingseems to be leading to circumscribed treatments of form.

None of these designers is an image-maker, which a poster-maker ideally should be,and the reliance on typography only makes this more obvious. For as long asgraphic communication remains the aim of graphic designers, formal invention willbe as crucial as clay is to a potter. On this evidence, British designers need to takeits challenge more seriously.

Above: Tom Hingston Studio. Below: Morag Myerscough, Studio Myerscough

All posters available from Blanka.

This Critique appears in the printed edition of Eye 74 (Winter 2009), available nowand on the Eye website. You can read all Rick Poynor’s Critiques for the magazineat bit.ly/Critiques.

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