The vast A-Z of The Designers Republic

Murray GM December 21, 2019

I’ve had this a while and finally gotten around to posting it. Mostly because there’s so much of it! AZTDR or A-Z of The Designers Republic is a vast body of work from the Sheffield duo. Chocked full of commercial, personal, political, cultural and random pieces. What makes it even richer is that the kickstarter version Unit Editions put together has tonnes of extra swag!

For people who went to design school in the UK in the 90s, DR were the coolest of cool. Every degree show had more than a few wannabes attempting to copy their style. The edition of Emigre with their cover and profile was one of the hottest items amongst me and my peers, and it’s still difficult to find (thankfully Letterform Archive now has the full edition online and in high res). Back then all things Japanese and Manga-esque were hot and DR channeled that perfectly. They blew apart the entrenched modernist graphic design with an assault of noise, layers, colours, fun and flippancy, all that pseudo intellectual designer bullshit didn’t stand a chance. Part punk, part techno and all future.

The main book is (as always) beautifully put together by the Unit Editions team. I really love this reverse treatment for the highlighting:

As I said it’s got a lot in it. I love these monographs as they always show lots of prep work and ideas, not just the finished pieces - so much more to be discovered there. Here’s just a few spreads and pages from this 512 page, very hefty tome.

With the main book came another book or catalogue of their studio work. It’s black and white, noisy and almost zine like. The back cover is perfect and seems to nail who they are in this simple and wonderful typographic gag.

Of course that was not all that was in the package. There was a bunch of ephemera, a tote bag and stickers!!

It’s one of the best packages I’ve received in a long time and thoroughly cheered me up.

However, it’s sad that with all the current political horse shit going on, this particularly salient piece of advice once again fell on deaf ears. Oh well time to start fighting hard again.

Here’s the book https://www.uniteditions.com/products/a-z-of-the-designers-republic

Letterform Archive - an eclectic sample

Murray GM January 25, 2017

One of the things I love most about visiting the Letterform Archive is the impromptu discovery of awesome bits of design. You can book a research session with them and get a focussed deep dive into a particular subject area, but as a volunteer you just turn up and get stuck in. At one of my sessions Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko from Emigré had just sent over a batch of posters and printed paraphernalia. Letterform Archive already has Emigré's archive including the digital development of the type faces, but this was a stack of items that they had been sent (by the looks of it back in the '90s). It was an amazing flashback to my time at art school. Here's a selection from the stack that includes the work of (amongst others) The Designers Republic, Phil Baines and Graphic Thought Facility. I particularly love the poster for The Residents gig in Zurich, not sure of the designer, Homer Flynn maybe?

Although the eclectic nature of the archive is being filtered heavily through the things I love, it's still amazingly diverse. Here's a bunch of shots that include Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style (see my copy here) and Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, dada letter art, type specimens and a few pics from the many, many design journals they have.

And this wonderful type specimen with the annotation in pencil explaining that the ragged top is the result of mice.

If you want to stay up to date with what the have join their 'Just in' mailing list: https://letterformarchive.org/this-just-in

Semiotext(e) Architecture

Murray GM January 15, 2015

This is Semiotext(e) Architecture from 1992. It's a massive (44x28 cm) landscape orientated collection of essays, experiments and ideas focussed on design, architecture and theory. I included the shot with my feet just to show it's size when opened. Totally unmanageable and doesn't fit on any of my bookshelves - which makes me love it even more.

I have three books from the independent publisher Semiotext(e); Architecture, USA and Radio - but this is visually the richest. It's a black and white production, which emphasises the dark and dirty style of the era and also makes it feel very underground and almost fanzine like. It's full on 'cult of the ugly' stuff and touches on the design for designers trend of the time, but also is very reflective of the DIY culture vibe (more here). For me this isn't the greatest piece graphic design but the variety of the content, the scale and the richness of the textures makes it rather special.

More from the '90s self publishing scene

Murray GM May 14, 2013

I've posted previously about how there was an idea in the early 90s of DIY culture. This manifested in many ways from 'crusty squatters' and indi-networks through to self publishing and a revival of the punk aesthetic and the 'zine. This post is about the later. Head Magazine was published by a small group of loosely associated people. Each issue was driven by one of them and whoever they could persuade to help them to produce it. This meant it had no strict identity as a magazine, with each issue being an unique artefact published at random intervals. Often contributors would appear across many issues but the subjects would be diverse, as each issue had a 'theme' associated with it. The issue shown above is No. 6 The Ambient Fishy Issue. The main themes were ambient music, noise, technology, conspiracy and paranoia. All sprinkled with a generous helping of mildly left wing politics and some tongue-in-cheek humour.

The magazine operated a very 'open' editorial policy, pretty much everything that was sent in made it to the issue, as long as it aligned with the theme. Content standard varies a lot but that was very much part of the ethos - sod the established ideas on what 'quality' is and let everyone have a go. As you may have guessed there was more than the odd aging punk involved. This is one of the key differences from the indi and self publishing scene of today. Today quality matters - a lot. Today, small independent magazines are surviving and thriving thanks to that focus on quality, both in terms of content and production. Access to cheaper and better production technology has certainly helped this. I wish that the very excellent http://www.newspaperclub.com/ had been around back then.

Colour printing was also a costly business, so single colour was the norm with most of the artwork created in bedrooms, then photocopied. This issue was a little different as it was put together on a PC (4mb of RAM) using Photoshop and QuarkExpress, and thanks to a few paid Ads it was printed and bound. The two creators; Mobile D-Unit and Faceless Networker laboured long and hard to get the chaotic, layered, dense and noisy layouts that feature throughout the mag. The imagery for each page was created as single page TIF files in Photoshop 2.5 (the days before layers and 99 levels of undo) using 'magic wand selections' and 'paste inside'. The images were shared back and forth, mainly by personal delivery of a 'zip disk', with each person adding their own touches, tweaks and layers. The main body copy was laid out over the top and fitted appropriately, if the fit wasn't right the image was changed. This took a lot of patience, effort and was prone to mistakes.

The issue is full of patterns, codes, repeat gags and deliberately bad type. The content is a continuous stream of visual noise flowing from spread to spread. You have to work hard to stay on track when reading an article as the design and the other content is always attempting to disrupt the flow. This is especially apparent when you discover an interesting nugget hidden away in the noise, finding your way back is not easy.

It's in no way a great piece of print design rather a signature of a time, place and attitude. It featured along with many other similar pieces in the Barbican's Jam: Style+Music+Media exhibition circa: 1996. This type of mag is long gone and has been replaced by a lively and growing community of self publishers and indi press. They are using digital and web based publishing technologies to create wonderfully rich and engaging pieces, often by blending them with hand printing and traditional print techniques. It's a great time to create a magazine. Yet still they scream "print is dead" as they did back in the '90s and every 10 years since. Must be on at least it's 4th resurrection by now - difficult to kill off something thats been with us 550 years.

Update

I decided that I should add all the spreads from Head 6, so here you go