In 2001, I did what any parent of a 10-year-old does and started visiting secondary schools. I hadn’t been into one since I was at school in the 1970s, and one aspect of these establishments amazed me. I recall school as a largely non-visual experience. Walls were bare. All the emphasis was on words. You could study history without looking at a picture of anything. But at the schools I now visited, the walls were covered with projects made up of words and pictures, with fancy typefaces and everything mounted on coloured papers. In some corridors it was like moving through a three-dimensional collage of imagery and text. It seemed that learning had become graphic, tactile, involving. Frankly, I was envious.
Books, magazines, record covers, road signs, posters, logos, film credits, TV graphics, packaging, postage stamps, instruction manuals, websites, the page you are reading now - the unseen hand of the graphic designer touches and moulds every area of our lives. Even the Word of God was given a contemporary graphic makeover when Canongate published a series of books from the Bible as little paperbacks with moody black-and-white photos on the covers.
The paradox of this graphic culture is that while it is truly everywhere, it is often considered unworthy of serious study or is simply dismissed. When the superb American graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan won the Guardian first book award, the poet Tom Paulin trashed it on BBC2’s Newsnight Review. Paulin is a learned man, but he seemed to have no idea what he was looking at, or how to assess it. The book’s many readers felt no such reservations.
Ken Garland, a graphic designer who began his career in the late 1950s as art editor of Design magazine, recalls the first stirrings of the graphic revolution. “In the early 1960s, there was very little realisation in the public of what graphic design is,” he says. “My generation thought that graphic design was an all-embracing activity, that it started with the concept, but it went all the way through to the final product. We expected or wanted to be involved the whole way along.”
In the period of optimistic reconstruction that followed the second world war, Garland and his colleagues saw graphic design almost as a calling. It was their mission to persuade clients that effective design would be good for business. Many designers thought it could even enhance the quality of life. The designer needed to be an imaginative generalist, able to think through the visual needs of a swish contemporary furniture company or a manufacturer of bricks.
European modernism had made only a limited impact on British commercial art - graphic design’s forerunner - in the 1920s and 30s. Making up for lost time, the postwar generation of British designers turned for inspiration to modernist design visionaries such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Jan Tschichold, who all espoused a rigorous sans serif “new typography” and a dynamic use of white space. Garland championed the modernist concept of “typophoto”: the graphic integration of type and photographic image. It was in the 1960s that our obsession with the power of “image” took hold and design became a vital component of everyday popular culture. Garland recalls seeing competitions to design record sleeves on the 60s pop music television programme Ready Steady Go! “The public did them. Everyone had a go and design became associated with rock’n’roll and pop as one big package. Nothing was ever quite the same after that.”
The new wave of designers, post-punk, were more attuned to youth culture than to the modernist conception of design as a means for transforming society that had inspired Garland’s generation. Neville Brody, celebrated at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1988 when still only 31, made his name as art director of The Face, and Peter Saville, subject of an acclaimed Design Museum exhibition last year, made his mark at Factory Records.
The designers who followed took it for granted that design was of crucial importance in contemporary culture and, unlike their more modest predecessors, were happy to claim the limelight. The arrival of desktop design technology boosted their sense that they were sitting at the nerve centre of modern communication. By 1990, no self-respecting studio could afford to be without a row of Apple Macintosh computers. Designers began to involve themselves in areas once the preserve of type designers, text editors, sound designers, digital film-makers. The multidisciplinary studio Tomato, founded in London in 1991 by a group of eight friends, even boasted a couple of musicians - members of the techno band Underworld - in its line-up. Their concerts and videos were a delirious fusion of pulsing sound and flashing typographic experiments.
Digital technology was also introducing the public to areas of visual communication once accessible only to experts. Anyone could lay out a professional-looking document using the new software templates. A routine school project, even at primary level, can now involve choices about typeface, type size and layout once familiar only to designers. It is possible to study graphic design at GCSE and A-level.
You can gauge the energy and confidence of graphic culture on any Saturday at the Magma shop in Earlham Street, Covent Garden. Fifteen years ago, once you had bought Brody’s monograph, the range of design books was pretty limited. Today, there are hundreds. Magma was opened in 2000 by Marc Valli, 35, who came to Britain from Brazil to study film, then worked in the film section of a bookshop, where he noticed the real action was not in film books but in design. Valli finds a broad mix of people visit his shop. “A lot of them are interested in music. Some of them are interested in fashion. A lot of them are into comics.” Then there are the skateboarders - “quite an obsessive crowd”. Kids as young as 10 or 12 drop by to study the graffiti books.
Valli isn’t alone in believing that the intense visual pleasures offered by graphic culture are beginning to usurp the place of fine art. In recent years, many artists have emphasised the conceptual, rather than the aesthetic, content of their work. Design, on the other hand, has often been unashamedly retinal, intent on creating a new visual form. Ian Anderson, a self-taught designer with a degree in philosophy, started The Designers Republic (TDR) in Sheffield in 1986, and the company has since built a cult following. “No matter what people do to try to get art into the newspapers - the sensationalism or whatever - art is a peripheral interest,” he says, “whereas design is at the core of everything that’s done now. Everything is designed - maybe overdesigned.” You might say the same thing about TDR’s work, but for its admirers this is a virtue. In the 1990s, designers began initiating their own projects: TDR has staged a number of exhibitions and published its own posters, which might be described as anti-advertisements. “Buy nothing. Pay now,” reads one.
Both Anderson and Valli argue that it is graphic culture, not art, that reflects the mentality and concerns of our time. Graphic expression connects with people because its fundamental purpose is communication, and this applies to even the most esoteric forms of message-making, such as TDR’s. If it doesn’t communicate, it fails.
“I don’t think contemporary art is ever going to come back,” says Valli. “The people who are going to change things visually are people who are working in a more graphic way. As art installations became more three-dimensional and conceptual, graphic designers just took over.” If we were to remake Robert Hughes’s Shock Of The New documentary in 30 years’ time, Valli suggests, its focus would be graphic culture.
If this is true, then it is a hard truth to recognise. We have invested so much in the idea of art’s central place in visual culture that it is difficult to accept that, while the art world’s store-minders were looking the other way, design may simply have slipped around the back. In the early 20th century, revolutionary modernists dreamed of reuniting art and life. Pioneering artists invented modern typography and laid the foundations for the development of graphic design. Could it be that what we see in our thriving graphic culture are signs that the reunification of art and life is well under way?
Note: This article was published in The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2004