..depressing yet ideologically affirming
the D&AD lecture theater, rammed packed full of apparent designers, students, teachers etc.. etc..just to build an image in ones head as to the lunacy of the event….some PAYING people from the audience had to stay outside and watch the lecture on live TV streaming from the room next door because they OVER BOOKED, and EVERY seat was filled….. complete madness–
anyway..
from overhearing various conversations throughout the half hour we were waiting for the talk to start, i can quite safely assume the room there was filled with not intrigued ‘graphic designers’ awaiting with anticipation to scrutinise Peter Saville on his responsibilites and perceptions of good and bad design, ready and armed with biting interrogative and examinative questions for the justification of his status as an ‘art director’/ ‘visual communicator’ NO NO NO. Alas, the room filled to the BRIMMMM, with fan boys, girls and starry eyes bed wetters from all over, from st martins students to Neville Brody,…. not an interesting person in sight.
depressing,
why….
because in this apparently well documented age of post illumination, we STILL as the audience do not understand what it IS we are ALL TALKING ABOUT>………what it is we are ACTUALLY SEEING, ‘ READING’ , LISTENING TO… and it couldn’t have showed more than tonight..self consciousness is not so apparent. It was like being at a sit down Japanese Michael Jackson gig. (not because there were lots of Japanese people there, no, it was the sheer hype you could feel in the air and on peoples vacantly docile expressions.
A short history
Im not claiming to be an authority in this field what so ever, nor on savilles, or brodies work but.. i have some things i would like to say, or mention.
the overall context: graphic design / visual communication / information design
the reality of the context: a person who almost single handily subverted (unbeknown to him at the time ) DESIGN THAT WORKS ( ie Russian constructivist communist propaganda) by stealing ‘elements’ (ie the forms, colours and textures which now have an intrinsic and inseparable connotative relationship with horrendous fascist dictatorship) and by applying these so called innocuous elements into POP CULTURE which were then used as a TOOL to SELL ‘artistic work’, this was then ASSIMILATED in nothing more than a formalist and arbitrary way by BIG BUSINESS in the 80s and 90s and thus paved the way for definition warping, mass accessibility to powerful tools, ideas and convitions that business and ’so called graphic designers’ used without second thought during application and what implications this has.
What the designers role was initially there for, was to simplify, translate and to honestly communicate without any self indulgence or personal interference in case of mistranslation……
NO instead we have….
people LIKE Peter Saville, Malcolm Garrett and Neville Brody who have believed or still believe it is ACCEPTABLE to use visual language without fully understanding what it ACTUALLY SAYS, what is ACTUALLY MEANS, how it ACTUALLY READS, which has led us to an age of mass confusion and docile incompetence’s. Giving way for sloppy, irrelevant and confusion, all the way from record sleeve covers through to GOVERNMENTAL BODIES polling day voting slips…….
i go on…
UNIFORMITY, MASS PRODUCTION, MASS COMMUNICATION………
did the not to distant history teach us anything, did we not learn the importance of this?Was the presence of several fascist leaders who used MASS COMMUNICATION in the 20th century NOT ENOUGH for us to UNDERSTAND why is it inportant to understand the power of the writen word in relation to the image?
WHY is it now acceptable for people/ business/ governments/ countries to misuse, misinform, mislead us all by using visual trickery and it being legally acceptable?
now im not suggesting we should revert to an authoritarian esque stance on such issues. BUT we should make it FULLY aware to the importance of understanding and sometimes adhering to the relevence of imagary and what it provokes. We NEED NOT pastiche, or parody. There is enough immidiate visual stimuli to forfill the now, the present the absolute relevent… without having to bring in dictorial propaganga stylisms to the present. The things in life i have most issues with in terms of design, are anything ,spoken by a government, food packaging and presentation, signage/wayfinding systems, educational systems.
RESPONSIBILITIES, may i refer you to a recent TED talk on ‘cheating’
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
i like what Neville Brody said on a Culture show ( number 26 or 27 at the end of February, cant actually remember which). He was was being asked a few questions on his thoughts of the new exhibition on at the Tate Modern which was on : Russian constructivists Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova.
when being asked on his thoughts of the imagery now knowing the history of what happened because of it, to paraphrase him he said
‘ you have to separate your self from it dont you’
so what he is saying is:
you must separate from the fact that, this Stalin led and Hitler co-signed propaganda is directly culpable for millions of deaths inflicted on the 20th century?????!!
WHAT A FUCKING CUNT
How DARE he say such inconceivably ludicrous and farcical statements on such sensitively poignant subject.
NEVILE BRODY YOU ARE AN IGNORANT CRETIN, of the HIGHEST ORDER
he is more so guilty than saville because he still practices these ideologies and gives justification for the existence of these ‘innocuous’ and ‘harmless’ worldly media blanketeers, such as Rupert Murdoch to whom owns every type of media entity known to man in most western countries.
To be allowed to FREELY ADVERTISE EVERY SINGLE DAY on the streets of one of the most importantly Economically and Politically influential cities in the world… LONDON… im referring to Rupert Murdoch and his FREE daily dose of self publicity otherly known as the LONDON PAPER??
Appropriation is weak, not clever visual puns are not big and are not clever.
And back to uniformity
It takes many shapes and forms some/most are more subtle than a macdonalds logo, often its a way of saying something, a tone of voice delivered with exact timing and subtle and unnoticeable precision, often because of the context of where both Saville and Garrett came from that being ‘graphic design’ graduates, it must be said they MUST be doing ‘graphic design’??
alas not, im not saying saville or garett have perpetuated it, they just conceived the idea.
people like PENTAGRAM perpetuated the idea through the conception of accepting Saville to work for them….as Saville said during the talk his company ‘Saville associates’ went under in the early 90s, but he was personally saved by a friend at Pentagram. this is how he got in. During his time as he pointed out, his ‘partnered’ were never into his work and many times Alan Fletcher said to Saville ‘ this is not graphic design’.
This begs the question as to why he wasnt fired or taken off of the team if that was the case. strange very strange. I think then it was more of an image thing and design needed some serious lifting, and if someone as so well revered as Saville wasnt in the worlds aparently best design team they were no longer this.
In retrospect, this may of helped lift the stature and relevance in pop culture but dragged Pentagram and the subject as a whole it down into the syphilitic depths of celebrity, narcissism, notoriety, self indulgent mutual masturbation. As an exercise in marketing it may have worked in the short term but failed in the long.
This accesibility opened the flood gates for what some people would call a positive step in visual communication, and thats 50,000 design graduates in the UK ALONE EVERY YEAR…….now what i would like to ask is how many of those graduates actually understand the importance and responsibility of designing something that is mass produced, how many of them care how it is used, is it even important that they care, if the answer to the last question is no, then why has the right for a political party in the western world to wear a uniform of ANY sort ILLEGAL ?
re:
Public Order Act 1936
http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?ActiveTextDocId=1083745
because it was made aware of the political potency of visual propaganda in both nazi germany and the soviet union.
saville
He and his pals perpetuated the ideas of graphic design being an easy way to decorate, misinform and warp visions of the thermoset reality of capitalism / or pop culture, an inextricable mould made of power, sway, polical potency and self interest. with little to no sense of a wider responsibility to what they are directly effecting and what intrinsic implications they have on the world. (this notion is more relevent now than in has been in a while for the reasons of ecomomic collapse)
he is one of the greatest perpetrators for visual pollution ( again unbeknown to him at the time )
issues with the context
this talk can be viewed in TWO ways….
1. he Peter Saville was asked by D&AD to talk there because they KNOW they could sell it out with absolute ease, and that they did, but with no REAL intention of addressing any real, serious, even relevent issues in design at the moment.
or
2. they did all of the above, ( because lets face it its true ) BUT also they may have had the intention of asking him to address some RELEVANT questions towards the currently transition that is happening in design, what is design, what is GOOD design, what is it called, is it called graphic design, visual communication or something else, what is art is design art?
alas…. i believe it was for number 1, and they touched on one or two aspects for literally a million of the second….it was a show,… typical LONDON showmanship…
( on d&ad’s part that is )
now, he is the interesting thing:
is the opening sentence you see on his website
This correlates with what he said at the talk about him realising on a seemingly very sobering day in his 3rd year at Manchester polytechnic after picking up a book in the library which he had never done so (according to him). he realised at that moment design was not what he initially thought it was. He was interested in the end, the finality, the forms the shapes of work, and realised graphic design was not about the self indulgent and the arbitrary. He went on to then say that in retrospect,
‘No one should be designing record covers after the age of 30’, and ‘Music covers are not graphic design, they do not communicate anything, they have no purpose in that respect.’
after this, he randomly serves the task of idenifying that he disagrees with the term ‘graphic designer’ in relation to him, ( without any real justification only talking about the term ‘graphic’ but was not clear to the point he was making) but then calling him self a ‘visual communicator’.
this tells me, Visual communication refers to an act of communication that bares no shape, form or resemblance of rigor , denoting the arbitrary nature of anything visual, communicating something, this is obvious, anything you can see visually communicates something, in itself bares no function at all.
AND THUS, that was a VERY sympathetic description of his own work. But not really identifying whether its relevent communication, good, bad, whether it works or doesnt. JUST ‘visual communication’
This is closely related to the study of fine art without the intellectual part. In which he would probably disagree with.
I SEE no place for him in this context, all he served was facilitate the notion of D&AD having such sway and potency within the ‘design community’ that they can get such ‘legends’ as Peter Saville. Unless he is going to outline FULLY and unambiguously what it is he does, what he respects, what he doesnt, whether his work is of use or no use to anyone else but him self. Until then he is only there to facilitate ulterior motivations.
its disgusting!
he is a complete and utter formalist, i dont disrespect this i just think its a shame hes thrown into the lime light of ‘graphic design’ as an important
figure, he says he now regrets doing his degree .. he didnt say why, but i believe its because he KNOWS it was down to him that made
graphic design accesible to the masses and he knows what he was doing was not graphic design…but being percieved as graphic design
as he begged and borrowed or sould i say stole ‘elements’ from avant garde artists from futurism to constructavists to bauhaus to swiss style….
and it was just an unholy accident that it came around to being like this … he refers to himself as a ‘visual communicator’ but .. ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING communicates something to someone for good OR for bad…. and thusthats his justification for his ‘ work ‘ he KNOWS his work does not communicate for the good as , as he quite rightly and many times pointed out he does work for him self and what matters to him.. in other words MOST of his work is 100% completely arbitrary APART from the manchester city identity stuff which is the closest thing hes done towards ‘functional meaningful design’ but he knows its shit, but couldnt turn the job down after being asked even begged to do it, even after trying to put the clients off from hiring him he knows hes not good and doing GOOD DESIGN… but he was put in an comprimising position between his ‘reputation as a graphic designer’ and ‘his own moral ideas’ of him self.
it was very interesting how, he was extremely good at preserving his own self and ideologies by hammering home that he
does what he likes
i just found depressing that the fact people didnt get what he really thouht of him self and the fact he wasnt prepared to identify what ‘GOOD DESIGN’ is, as this would comprimise his very well preserved identity of the brand that is Peter Saville, by defining what real good design is would thus make him a BAD designer… and ……no bodies wants to label them selfs that
I was going to put him in the comprimising position of asking the question ‘ what would your definition of good design be in the context of designer and audience, the audience NOT being yourself’ and ‘what would you call it’.
I see this talk not as it appeared to be presented, a talk about his life or even a talk about the future of design… but its kind of weird how he does ‘design talks’ but doesnt class him self as a designer per se’…which leads me to think, that he feels ever so slightly responsible for the way things have gone over the past 30 years and all the absolute visual pollution that has resulted from his initial ignorance over the absolute importance of understanding how communication works, he wants to rid him self of this guilt, but TRYING to say this is his equivilent of recycling plastic…. get the feeling he WOULDNT do ANY talks if he didnt feel even slightly.
or hes just perpetuating his identity as ambiguous figure head of the design world.
As said in the TED talk above, about how people become less reluctent to ‘cheat’ or ’steal’ when the concept of morality / reality is once removed from the actuality, ie: stealing tokens or an office pen instead of money or a ten pence piece. Saville uses the very same trick by using his brand ‘Peter Saville’ in such a way that he can morally detatch him self from the reality of which he has inflicted himself upon. He even refers to him self in the 3rd person for fuck sake…….He appears to be very moralistic, and ethical. But the above i believe proves him to be is a decietful machiavellianist with no actual regard as to what he has done.
everyone needs to step the fuck up and denounce these charletons, and denounce D&AD
Filed under: design, jokes , peter saville talk d & a d and design talk london
