I’m admittedly a bit over-vocal to my peers about how much I dislike [what I consider] the East Coast Graphic Design Tradition. As a student of fashion, musical sub-cultures, other cultures in general, nothing about Glaser or Rand’s work struck me as true. I felt appreciation for the formal qualities of their reductivism, yet alienated by what felt like packaged good feeling sung to an Us Versus Them tune. I refer to that [distinctly and unfortunately American] work as “one-liners”, partly because it stalls serious consideration, past maybe a few inches. Design is not and never was a mass duke-out to see who’s wittier and quicker in cheerfully solving X or Y. If its students see themselves as commodities in competition for the attention of creative directors and ad agency budgets, we continue to disservice meaningful collective dialogue and lock ourselves further into complacency. Long-term effects range from the literal (poorly balanced pay scales) to the less tangible but more grave (a skewed way of engaging with our surroundings and manufacture).
I first saw Peter Saville’s work as a pre-teen, when my neighbor brought over a New Order album. I remember making fun of the cover artwork and asking “What’s this supposed to be?” or something similarly dismissive and resolute, like a kid would say. Now, I’m grateful for his conceptual reasoning to avoid quick summation, as much as I am for his public refusal to consider the designer a service-person, here to articulate their client’s needs with a recognisable but ultimately wipeable fingerprint.
Saville on the idea of ‘the recognised formula’:
They were trying to teach graphics as epitomised by the recognised practitioners of the time – a Milton Glaser or a Pentagram. But they’d lost grasp of the moment. The agenda was how to find witty visual puns to summarise a situation: a logo for a restaurant could be a bite out of a plate. Well, to a young person growing up on Roxy Music, that was utterly banal. I won’t spend five minutes thinking down that line. It’s stupid. It tells me nothing about the restaurant… What I learned from style culture was if you dress a particular way, you communicate with like-minded people. I just employed exactly the same technique with graphics. So forget the bite out of the plate. The choice of type alone will tell you what kind of restaurant this is. Get the typeface, size, position, spacing and mood right, and it will tell you. Is it Le Gavroche or is it McDonald’s? It’s the language of semiotics, not of puns.
This is some of my favorite typographic work by Peter Saville. I recommend Peter Saville: Estate, designed by Lehni-Trüb, for a more focused look into the ethos of the greatest graphic designer of our generation.