When I was a graphic design student at Swinburne in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time in the library. I don’t know where everyone else was, but I was in the library. They had lots of old Graphis Annuals stretching back through the seventies, even the sixties, and most students then aspired to design in the style of Milton Glaser or Herb Lubalin. But there were dustier books too, graphic design books from the thirties and forties and fifties, with art deco-ish alphabets and florid hand-written type, printed usually in two colours on yellowed stock. These books didn’t ever seem to get borrowed, even taken down from the shelf, but over time I was drawn to them. There were also books about the art and design from a past that seemed more exciting and tumultuous than my suburban world – Constructivism, Futurism, Dada. Long after I finished studying at Swinburne I would still haunt the library, and somewhere in my out-of-control studio (or maybe in the shed, where I haven’t gone for a while, since I saw a tiger snake going in) I’ve got reams of pages photocopied from them.

Gather round, young people, and let me tell you: before the internet, things were different. There wasn’t the same access to the entire history of everything that we take for granted today. (Even on the radio, they played the Top 40 and nothing much else. I remember once in about 1980 listening to my friend Bruce’s Explosive Hits ’74 and laughing till I cried at those gloriously glam pop songs that I had completely forgotten.) It felt like the world was divided into tiny subcultures – usually based around which music you liked, which magazines you read – and each subculture has its own fashion signifiers and its own graphic style. I recently designed the cover for a book called The Eighties, which was a really tricky design job. Everyone involved had very different, very strong memories about the eighties according to how old they were, and felt passionately that it should be about Neighbours and BMXs, or music and haircuts, or Hawke and Bond. Today my children can watch Buster Keaton or Miyazaki movies, and argue about whether David Bowie or the Beatles are better. Everything seems like it is available, history has crumpled in on itself and it’s all there all at once on iTunes.

When I was a fledgling designer, we used to have to mark up typewritten pages of text and send it off to the typesetter, who would type it in to a green-screen computer and twiddle the knobs, and a day or two later it would come back as typeset text, which one would then paste up onto grid board with rubber cement. I was just appallingly bad at this – my mark-ups were always wrong, and I spent countless nights adjusting the leading by cutting up every line of text and re-glueing it, or on my hands and knees at two in the morning looking for a missing scrap of text in the carpet. There were only a handful of dowdy typefaces available – Helvetica, Garamond, Times, Futura, Gill Sans. It was really hard to do anything that felt different. The technology dictated what was possible, and it was hard to reconcile the design work I saw in magazines from the UK and loved with what I did.

Through the eighties and into the nineties I was doing a lot of posters for fringe theatre companies in Melbourne, and I was pretty lucky in that the people I was working with mostly let me do what I wanted. I remember the revelation of seeing a copy of New Socialist magazine (designed by Neville Brody), and seeing the designs from some of those old library books reflected back at me. I could see how he was re-interpretting older styles but making them contemporary. I started hand-drawing type, trying to make something that felt fresh and unusual, tracing some of those old photocopies or making up my own typefaces. I did a poster for a brilliant avant-garde opera based on the film The Cars That Ate Paris, and on the poster I spelled out the title with car number plates. To do this (before I had a scanner or a computer with a colour screen) I had to walk around taking photos of number plates, get the film developed, then take the photos to the shop where they let me use their colour photocopier, cutting them up, scaling and re-copying, until I had them the right size and suitably grunged.

I’m going on about this because now I would probably just find a font that was based on number plate letters, and maybe use some filter in Photoshop to make it look more authentic. And that’s pretty sad. In a world where we have access to incredible amounts of information, where I can search through hundreds of examples of Russian Constructivist typography in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, often we wind up using Trajan or Caslon Antique to convey a sense of something historical. I’ve done it. [I’m sure you will have seen stuff on Youtube about the ubiquity of Trajan on movie posters – the act of translating a typeface from a hand-chiselled stone column in ancient Rome to a digitised typeface has removed any variation and authenticity (there’s that word again). Trajan has become a signifier of importance and grandeur, but it’s about as real as woodgrain laminex]. The first printed type was made in blackletter, imitating the style of the hand-written manuscripts it was replacing. Websites are designed to look like books or magazines. We seem to need the recreate a gutted, kitsch version of the past even though the technology has moved on.

As well as posters, I did some set designing for theatre in the eighties and nineties. When things were getting a bit stressy sometimes leading up to a show, one might say ‘In a few weeks it will all just be flats on the back of a truck’, meaning that what seemed so important in the moment would soon be gone. Now I realise the truth of that – the posters I have stashed away in the shed (that I’m afraid to go into on account of the snake) are all that is left of many of those shows. Looking at the work I did back then it seems so much of its time, like it felt looking at those books from the mid-century in 1982.

David Pearson’s design work over several series of the Penguin Great Ideas series has been inspiring. His website address is typeasimage.com, and that’s what he does. There is a level of acute observation and attention to detail and CARE that is exciting. I probably wouldn’t read these books but I want them all. Like a film that has been art directed with care, his designs transport you to another time, and give you texture and context with which to appreciate the book.

 

Peter Long is the Senior Designer at Black Inc. Books and the Art Director for The Monthly magazine.