The Two Cultures of Design

The April issue of Creative Review magazine features an intriguing article by Adrian Shaughnessy, founder of the Intro design group in London, and the man behind the Sampler series of surveys of music graphics. In “From Here to Here” (the title only makes sense if you can see the images that go with it) he argues that the once homogeneous field of graphic design has “begun to separate into two distinct strands”. On one side there is professional practice in all its forms; on the other a field which he terms “design-culture graphics”. This territory is inhabited by designers doing their own, often self-initiated thing: publishing books and magazines, starting websites, and designing and selling T-shirts, posters, DVDs, and other graphic doodads. “Stylistically it is usually radical, adventurous and sometimes even downright purposeless,” he writes.

The only questionable part of this claim is the strangely tentative suggestion that this process of splitting has only just begun. As Shaughnessy, a long-time design watcher, must know, it has been under way and gathering momentum for at least a quarter of a century. In the US, Emigre – the very paradigm of an entrepreneurial, alternative design-culture initiative – has been operating successfully for 21 years. By the early 1990s, it had helped to inspire an international uprising of go-it-alone garage fontographers.

In Britain, the split began with the new wave that followed punk in the late 1970s. Designers such as Brody, Saville, Malcolm Garrett, Rocking Russian and 23 Envelope were so notable because, not only did they shun the mainstream in which designers would once have expected to find work as a matter of course, but they also produced the most inventive and durable British graphic design of the period. Their audience was other young people, and it’s well documented that their example inspired many to become designers. In 1993, I wrote an article for the AIGA Journal titled “The Two Cultures”, describing just such a split in British graphic design (reprinted in Design Without Boundaries). Inevitably, the professional side of design was extremely slow to acknowledge this unwelcome challenge to the status quo. First it rejected this work as “style graphics”, then it ridiculed it as “design about design”.

The splitting has been gradual and cumulative, but it moved up a gear in the 1990s. The reason that Creative Review, which has been around since 1980, is publishing such an article now would seem to be that, in the last few years, the split has become so glaring that it simply has to be taken into account. In Britain, a great many young designers emerge from design schools today with no intention of joining design’s mainstream. For young single people who want to express their individualism in their work, the idea of a small, informal collective started by a group of friends is hugely attractive – it’s an extension of student life. Garrett, inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1960s Factory, tried something similar with his company, Assorted Images, in the early 1980s; Tomato, formed in 1991, did much to popularise the idea of the collective in Britain and other countries.

The arrival of the first Magma design bookshop in London, in 1999, gave tangible expression to the split (Magma has since opened another London store and one in Manchester). By the simple expedient of installing a stylish, ceiling-high shelving system in its tiny shop, located off Shaftesbury Avenue, turning all the book covers outwards so you could actually see them, and playing trendy music, it created a space that conveyed an intense sense of graphic excitement. You can buy the same book elsewhere, but it’s more enjoyable – cooler – to get it at Magma. In other words, the shop recognised the need for careful presentation of the stock, an insight that is absolutely basic in other kinds of retailing. The wonder is that something like this didn’t happen several years earlier.

The most interesting part of Shaughnessy’s article is the claim made by Marc Valli, who runs Magma, that not everyone who throngs the stores on a Saturday is a graphic designer. Valli believes that graphic design (like other three-dimensional forms of design) has ceased to be only a specialist “professional” discipline and become a form of culture that attracts young people whose jobs have nothing to do with design.

There may be an element of exaggeration or wishful thinking in this, but it certainly makes sense to me. As a non-designer, I became fascinated by “design culture” in the early 1980s precisely because of the new wave graphic communication aimed at my own social group. It seemed natural, since I was already fascinated by art, film and photography, to find out about this form of visual expression. Over the last 10 or 15 years, writing about graphic design, I have often wondered why more visually literate people outside design don’t share this interest. I hung in there partly because I was convinced that visual communication was so significant in our culture that it would eventually receive more general attention and analysis. If Valli is right about his customers and their concerns are a sign of underlying developments, that moment may be at hand.