Label

When I was at primary school I jumped on the ‘school magazine’ bandwagon, though sooner rather than later. Multiple A3 photocopies folded together into a crude black-and-white publication, and sold to a queue of supportive/sympathetic parents in the assembly hall before lessons began. We raised a small amount of money for the school, and in so doing they didn’t dictate the content, so I suppose what we did was entrepreneurial (I still remember haggling on the sale price with the headmistress). To the best of my recollection, my project – imaginatively titled ‘School Mag’ – had the longest run of all… two issues; it was the end of year six that curtailed operations. To speed things along, the wise thing would have been not to insist on doing the whole thing myself, and share some of the responsibilities. The lessons of life.

Roll forward twelve years and I am part of an all-together more sophisticated and slicker operation: working on Label magazine’s design team. Label is a free fortnightly magazine produced by Loughborough Students Media. The design team, of which I am part, is responsible for coalescing text and graphics. We read the content in advance and request photographs and illustrations from the section heads, or else source them ourselves. Then, over two evenings we design the section we have been allocated, which changes from week to week. Into the early hours of a Wednesday morning the editors and section heads edit and package everything together so that by Friday the magazine is printed and Loughborough students can read what’s going on in their dining halls and flats.

You can view back issues of Label from this year online here, but here are some my favourite spreads that I have designed (I also designed the Sports logo because previously we didn’t have one).

Life

Google Books, one of my favourite research sites, now boasts a large collection of Life magazine issues from decades ago that can be read in their entirety for free. They are an interesting opportunity to evaluate the design choices of yesteryear, some of which stand up well in my opinion. I particularly like the graphic cover of the July 14, 1952 edition: a hung-over man – scrappily drawn and worse-for-wear – sporting a bolt through his head.

Turn a few pages, however, and the design becomes less timeless: advertisements for toothpaste with “active chlorophyll”, ‘safer’ cigarettes, and another for cleaning products that asks ‘Should men wash dishes?’ and decides that the wife will probably do them. Though to look at this another way, we have our modern equivalents: skin cosmetics that use a bull-shitty jargon of ‘Boswelox’ and ‘collagen biospheres’ to cloak themselves in a medicinal air, alcohol advertising in the face of a binge-drinking culture and cleaning adverts that still depict women as the completer of domestic chores, all be it because her husband is too inept. Despite this lengthy introduction my intention is not to look at social history through the lens of graphic design.

   

I came across The Telegraph’s reproduction of Lennart Nilsson’s photographs from the book A Child is Born. These photographs – including the very first of a living embryo inside the womb – created a storm when they were first published in Life in 1965. It occurred to me that I might be able to see them in this context, and this issue is also available to view on Google Books here, with the article Drama of Life Before Birth on page 54.

Any designer worth their salt should find nature inspiring, particularly the origins of human life. It’s humbling and bizarre to consider our microscopic and alien origins. This photograph shows a five week old embryo with a very rudimentary face. At some point we all looked like this (and indeed some enthusiastic gurners still can). These pictures emphasise the commonality of all humans, before age, culture and society make their mark on us and send us on individual convergent paths, good and bad. In this light they only reinforce the idea that all we should treat all people as equals in the same manner as we would wish to be treated. But they also remind us of our fragility as biological machines, and in a form more pleasing than a raging hangover, a.k.a. a bolt through the head.

A propaganda failure

The study of propaganda makes you more sensitive to the examples you see about you every day. For my dissertation I am exploring the nature of propaganda and government, and propaganda’s ability to reproduce or resist the imbalance of power in society. When The Sun newspaper publicly proclaimed their support for the Conservative Party before the Labour Party conference, it positioned itself as form of resistant propaganda seeking to bring about political change, and marked the end of Rupert Murdoch’s support for New Labour. A cynical view would be that this switch was a reflection of growing support for The Conservatives, whom The Daily Telegraph places in the recent polls at 41% to Labour’s 28%, and was a move designed to ingratiate Murdoch with the probable future leaders of the country, rather than a sudden change in the newspaper owner’s political beliefs. Regardless of the reason, The Sun recently launched a campaign directed against the Prime Minister, accusing him of writing an inconsiderate hand-written letter of sympathy to the mother of deceased Guardsman Jamie Janes in Afghanistan. Nick Robinson points out that the issue of the letter’s legibility and possible spelling mistakes, are being used by The Sun as a proxy for the “more important debate about whether ‘our boys’ are fighting and dying in vain”. As propaganda it has somewhat backfired, with growing sympathy for the attack on Gordon Brown due to his eye-sight and his reputation for poor handwriting. It seems The Sun has misjudged the overall mood of the country, or at least the mood of those who oppose the war and believe Gordon Brown’s foreign policy in Afghanistan to be wrong. People may believe the government can do more to supply and reinforce the armed forces, to reduce the rate of casualties, but this issue is separate to that of Gordon Brown’s sincerity in his expressions of sympathy.

The letter as it appeared in The Sun with the caption: "Shoddy ... Pm's scrawled, barely legible letter with errors highlighted"

Charles and Ray weren’t brothers…

…as I first assumed (years ago).

I am slightly disappointed by the frequency with which I have been writing blog posts recently. It is probably for my benefit more so than for anyone else, because I always feel that essay-writing is an excellent way to learn, and to consolidate what you know. If you can put down in words some new perception or something that you have learned, and structure it in a way that is clear and coherent, then you go a long way in reinforcing your knowledge and benefit from being able to scrutinise it. I consider this to be the closest thing that I do to keeping a diary, as I see that my study of design inevitably shapes my personality; being a designer is not so much a profession that you can step in and out of as a lifestyle that demands that on some level your mind is always at work.

Why I am writing this…

I was very satisfied today to have something affirmed that I have suspected for a while. Eames Demetrious – in his talk The design genius of Charles + Ray Eames – recalled a ‘brutal’ quote of his grandfather (Charles): “The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem”. At times I have considered whether I have a style; previously, I decided that I did not, and saw this as something that would develop as my designing improved, partly based upon some advice I had been given. Later, after reading Paul Rand, who said not to confuse style with form, I concluded the absence of a style is probably a good thing. In abundance it highlights predetermined thinking and therefore laziness. A good designer bases their original solutions on a solid bed of research.

My recent preoccupation has been the design field in which I could or should specialise. I feel a pressure to choose, but my tendency is to not want to be pigeon-holed, mainly because I feel that design skills are translatable across different mediums. This all-encompassing view of design is one shared by Charles and Ray Eames; at least, this is the impression I gather from Demetrious’ talk. Throughout their career the couple worked with film and animation in parallel with furniture design and architectural projects. Whilst it is a fascinating talk, it is not very well structured and goes at a very fast pace, so I shall have to return to it again. On the theme of design boundaries, I was rather impressed by something drawn to my attention by Barbra Streisand in her recent Jonathan Ross interview, which rather persuaded me that my view of design was a natural one. Streisand loves architecture, the design of buildings inside and out, and has done her own interior design work. She remarked that she would design her own clothes to match the wallpaper and to avoid colour clashes. However, she later discovered that the great architects like Frank Lloyd Wright would design the dresses for the women who lived in their houses so that they would complement their surroundings. As she said herself: “how wonderful”.

Mrs Darwin D. Martin, c.1910 in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who probably also designed the dress.