A Third Way?

Would you pass up a juicy brief from the swoosh, the golden arches or any other glossy global with cash to spend but a somewhat chequered back-story? Is there room for conscience in our glitzy, soundbite world?

In his time, Jonathan Barnbrook has turned down Coca-Cola, Nike and a seemingly innocuous leisure company who, after some digging, turned out to be owned by a landmine manufacturer linked with the Korean War. And while he stresses that ranting for its own sake can be counterproductive, if the opportunity arises he’ll make it abundantly clear why that client has been crossed off the list.

“You have to take responsibility for what your clients do,” he shrugs. Consumers and commissioners are waking up to the power of visual communication as a prime shaper of our culture, but the transition from determination to disillusionment is all-too common. His Soho-based studio regularly receives correspondence from design graduates unsure of how to balance watertight morals with a half-decent living.

“I’m sure I’d be a lot richer if I agreed to work for large corporates, but I’d be unhappy,” is Jonathan’s take on the issue. “It’s an outdated idea to put over the client’s message and not think about what you’re doing. Working for a trendy sports manufacturer isn’t necessarily the ultimate job. I don’t see it as kudos – to me, kudos would be working for a charity. Money is an issue; you have to keep going. But I’m not starving. I can turn down work and still survive.”
 
So has he burnt his bridges with the agencies that came bearing accounts that for many designers would carve a reputation and top their folio with a crown, albeit a thorny one? “They’ve never been in touch again,” he’s prepared to admit. “But to be honest, we don’t want to be desperate to get work from these sorts of people.”

Jonathan’s close ties with the global underground scene inform his often politically-motivated design and typography. When the Coca-Cola brief landed on his desk, he immediately picked up the phone to Kalle Lasn, founder of Vancouver-based counter-culture organisation Adbusters, to work through the ethical dilemma.
 
Kalle himself is optimistic. “People are more aware now; creative people are starting to feel their responsibility,” he insists. “They had to bow low before corporate clients and kiss their arses – now the feeling is that it’s us, not the corporations, who are the cool-makers and the cool-breakers.”

Jonathan first crossed paths with Adbusters and their culture-jamming magazine back in 2000, when they set out their individualist stall in a manifesto entitled First Things First. “Too much design energy is being spent to promote pointless consumerism,” it read, “and too little to help people understand an increasingly complex and fragile world.”

It created “quite a ruckus,” Kalle recalls, with many ‘old-school’ designers protesting that client satisfaction must always be top of the list of priorities. Their argument boiled down to the scale of success: two hundred employees polishing the corporate crown are better than twenty who subvert it. But the ruckus was there, and many young design and advertising students signed up.

One of Adbusters’ central concerns, he explains, is that the culture many of us swear by is “spoon-fed to us” – filtered down from the top echelons of the multinationals as they scrabble over each other in a “quest to put a glow around brands. To create cool.”

In a world that is gradually fabricated around us, fashion and social acceptability are handed down ready-made: “Culture no longer grows from the bottom-up. We should be able to decide for ourselves what we like.”

Almost from birth, we’re told what is fashionable to eat, drink and wear – and it’s only through the ever-expanding mouthpiece of the media that this is made possible. So in a world so firmly under the control of the ‘creators of cool’, is the brand-polishing bandwagon the only way to make a name in the design industry?

“It’s the job of every human being to be proud of what they’re doing, and do it wholeheartedly,” he declares. “But visual communicators have become part of the marketing arm of corporations. It’s not the job of designers to give clients everything they want, but to try to be ethical whilst making the world a better place. They should have the courage and ethical guts to say no.”

But clearly it oversimplifies the situation to polarise all potential clients into good and bad, light and dark, ethical and unethical. I challenge Jonathan to draw a line in the sand. “Ethical clients are concerned about the impact they have, and will have in the future,” is his considered response. But while certain issues – such as worker exploitation, war profiteering or wanton destruction of the environment – will automatically warrant a firm refusal, there are inevitably grey areas.

“With some companies it’s more about what they represent,” he goes on. “We’ll always research around a company before making a decision, find out who they might be owned by and so on.” So after 17 years in the industry, has he felt any sense of disillusionment himself since the heady days of student activism?

“If anything our work has become more extreme; more confident,” he reflects. “Graphic designers are finally standing up and saying no. Of course it’s difficult if you work for someone else; if it’s not your choice. But then you can always use your talent to do something useful in your own time.”

Jonathan’s ethos sits at odds with much of the London design community, which he identifies as “very commercial, intensely competitive and very much about the money.” But Barnbrook Design has always kept an international outlook.

“There’s a lot of underground stuff in London, but nothing compared to New York or Berlin,” he observes. So why continue to be based in the Capital? “Our work is very British in style, particularly our typography,” he asserts. “We have lots of connections with Tokyo, and our British aesthetic is very different to what they’re used to.”

In an industry where smooth, clean-cut visuals can put a glossy sheen on a rotten core, Jonathan has touched on a buzzword that Kalle believes is an early signpost of change from the ground up. “The last couple of generations have seen a slick, commercial, corporate aesthetic,” he observes. “The big project of the next generation is to develop a new aesthetic not driven by big branding, that has a sustainable future.”

“Design anarchy is hard to predict, but I sense a bold move away from modernism and slickness,” Kalle goes on. “A ratty, organic feel that moves away from straight lines to reflect stalks of plants, perhaps. There’s a public feeling about slickness within the design community, an acceptance of uncoated paper as a medium and so on.”

“Grids and straight lines mark the archetypal designer of the past, sat in front of a computer with a template, dividing the page into little bits, creating slickness so it pops off the page and highlights the product.” A distancing effect, perhaps, that separates the consumer from the client with thick, shiny plate glass? “It’s boring,” is Kalle’s less complicated way of putting it. “And no-one has the guts to break the paradigm.”

If design is the language that shapes and reflects our culture, he argues, forcing a regimented structure of images and typography into a tight grid will inevitably cause a backlash; an overspill; an organic sprouting elsewhere.

“Designers have not realised what power they have. With power comes responsibility, and just by realising that, the designers of the future are making a step forward. The designers of the past by-and-large sold out – they were the foot-soldiers of consumer culture. But the black-and-white choice between corporate design and small non-profit creative projects is a false route. There’s a third way emerging that’s much more tantalising and lucrative.”

© Nick Carson 2007. First published in Issue 6 of TEN4 magazine

Graffiti in NYC

 

“New York is one of the ugliest cities in the world,” declares Hugo Martinez in the no-nonsense, self-assured drawl so characteristic of the Capital of the World. “It’s a cacophony of fourth-rate architecture, all mixed up. It doesn’t have any grand buildings. What gives the city character is the immense fight between the classes – you can’t picture NYC without graf in the background.”

 

Contentious words guaranteed to strike a chord with some and a nerve with many, not least Lieutenant Mona of the dramatically-titled Anti-Graffiti Task Force. Spearheading the city’s zero-tolerance initiative – including a dedicated 311 graffiti-reporting hotline, although work in progress merits a 911 call – Mona’s official line is one of rigid condemnation. “I refer to them as vandals, because that is what they are. Make no mistake, they are not artists. Vandals are not interested in artistic expression, or social commentary, all they care about is getting their ‘ups’ all over the city.”

 

It’s statement that Martinez dismisses as “moronic” – although he doesn’t deny the core accusation. “Why can’t an artist be a vandal?” he counters. “I don’t trust art that’s legal. The world is fucked up – art is institutionalised if it’s legal. Art has to change something.” Dismissing the vast majority of the world’s graffiti as “bullshit”, Martinez argues that NYC remains the undisputed vanguard of the culture not only because the city gave birth to it, but because of the fiercely defiant attitude that still beats at its heart. He lists just four other cities worthy to share this kudos: Los Angeles, Rio, Sao Paulo and Mexico City.

 

Romanticising the situation a tad in favour of the underdog, it’s that age-old struggle between the trampled underprivileged and the ultra hard-line establishment – the former spraying their way back into public consciousness to re-appropriate a city that’s sold its soul to the high-rise fat cats; the latter scrubbing and scouring away their identities and clapping those “poor working-class schmucks” in the slammer.

 

But then battling the system’s no fun if the system rolls over and takes it. In January 2006, with the sale of aerosol paint to minors already prohibited – and merchants obliged to keep it locked away from potential shoplifters – Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr. developed controversial legislation that would make it illegal for anyone under 21 to possess spray-paint or permanent markers. This sparked outrage from fashion mogul Marc Ecko, who sued Vallone and Mayor Bloomberg on behalf on art students everywhere. They backed down in May.

 

Bring it on, eggs Martinez. “Repression leads to aggression,” he asserts, exposing the core of any self-respecting class struggle. “Republicans are really good for graf – they believe in repression, and hard-line measures have made graffiti boom. Writers are inspired by being erased, and come up with quicker, more unusual ways to do it.”

 

“There are 11,000 train cars and 140,000 buildings in New York,” he goes on, clearly having done his research. And the advent of ‘the buff’ in the early ‘80s – a chemical wash that stripped the paint off trains every night – didn’t stamp out graf so much as fire it up further. “When they attacked the subway system and brought in graffiti-free trains, it moved onto the buildings,” he observes. “In the last twenty years, graf has blossomed again. Everyone’s killing the streets; they erase them much more often than the trains.”

 

Now in his mid-50s, Martinez has been immersed in the culture since his days as a philosophy student in 1972 – when he shuffled some Puerto Rican teenagers painting trains into a loose collective called United Graffiti Artists. Now, as part of his All City Project – the phrase ‘all city’ designating a writer with visible tags in all five boroughs – he’s invited an eclectic group of graf writers from teens to middle-age to spray their multicoloured mark all over the regulation décor of a low-income 1960s apartment.

 

And he has no qualms about sharing his views on the rest of the art world. “I didn’t want to turn it into a latrine for the wealthy, like every other gallery,” he scowls. “The art world is fifty people, and it represents their culture. Art’s a commodity.”

 

“There’s no such thing as a graf artist,” he continues, building up steam now. “That describes beautifying private property; figurative art. That’s not graffiti. It’s like Pat Boone is to rock ‘n’ roll – a dumbed-down version. A true graf writer will wait for a muralist, and then go over it. They have no love for private property – it’s more like punk rock. NYC is all about fighting and appropriation. Art doesn’t have to be legal – on some level, it’s all against one institution or another.”

 

© Nick Carson 2006. First published in Issue 5 of TEN4 magazine

 

Why I Love: Eye contact

As a non-Londoner, I find that the Underground works quite a bit better than its provincial counterparts. In many cities, a complaint that your train is a minute later than hoped would be met with a blank stare. In the rural depths, the fact that your weekly bus has come at all is cause for celebration. Unfortunately, the capital also tends to vindicate Eliot’s portrayal of a faceless crowd flowing over London Bridge.

On the tube we’re greeted with an impassable wall of books and newspapers. On the surface the city may be buzzing, but on some of the subterranean levels it wouldn’t seem much amiss to spot Gollum sitting quietly reading the Metro. Which is why I love those fleeting moments when two tortured souls connect – eyes meet, betray a glimmer of acknowledgment, then slide back to the stories of the day. A rare smile between strangers can make the fact that the air-conditioning has packed in and you’re stuck between stations, head wedged in an armpit, seem a little less like Armageddon.

It doesn’t have to be a case of boring your gaze through a fellow commuter’s eye-sockets until they’re forced to react with violence. Take the inevitable shared interest in a must-see headline. Granted, it can be annoying when the rest of the carriage snake their heads round your paper to study exactly who slept with whom, where and how much they were paid to say so. But it can also be reassuring to share a mutual tut and shake of the head at the shenanigans before us, or a grin at a particularly quirky morsel of news.

Sometimes, turning up the corners of your mouth and focussing on a stranger’s eyes, rather than a spot two inches behind them, may make you seem more terrifying than the most depraved psychopath. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try: one can always take refuge in a stop-by-stop analysis of the Central Line if it all goes wrong.

This article was published in The Guardian (G2 section), Tuesday 3rd August 2004

We must build ‘creative city’ reputation

How does a city become renowned for its creative output?

The glittering sprawl of the Bullring is heralded as a pinnacle of urban regeneration, and the role it’s played in challenging nationwide prejudice can’t be downplayed. But for those small, fiercely independent creative businesses operating within the city, there’s only so much a blue-and-silver hump can do to represent them. On a national scale, if that’s all that’s held up to counterbalance the stories of factory closure and gang violence, there’s a danger of those silver discs being perceived as a shiny covering for an empty shell.

The real question is whether – at this stage – widespread public perception should be our primary concern. Trying too hard can have a detrimental effect, and a top-down blanket marketing drive to assert that ‘Birmingham is creative – honest’ screams of desperation. The truth is, within individual creative niches – such as jewellery and bhangra music – the city’s reputation is already second to none. Our design community is flourishing, winning tenders for influential clients ahead of London rivals. Quality of work is speaking for itself where it matters.

Achieving an all-encompassing reputation for ‘creativity’ overnight is unrealistic. Step one is for creative industries to achieve recognition and respect within the city boundaries: first and foremost, to be seen as industries in the true, economically beneficial sense of the word.

It’s already started. This year’s Birmingham Young Professional of the Year – Ruth Ward, Director of Neon Communications – caters to the growing demand for championing creative businesses and activities. Neon has flourished, clients ranging from FILM Birmingham to New Art Birmingham – respectively heralding the ignition of a feature film industry and a major international modern art festival to start putting the second city on the map.

This is also the second year running that the overall BYPY Award winner has been a ‘creative’. In 2005 it was Stef Lewandowski of 3Form, who represents both the design community and the music industry through his international record label, Type. For Ruth and Stef to receive an award associated in the past with Birmingham’s more conventional business strengths – IT, Law and Accountancy – marks a significant turning point.

Crucially, it acknowledges that young creativity can go hand-in-hand with professionalism: a viable new resource to be tapped, taking the baton from manufacturing as a core strength for the city. Both of them sit on the recently-formed Creative Birmingham Businesses panel, tasked with addressing the problem of rich substance stifled beneath a ‘brand’ that simply doesn’t do it justice. Step one, both agree, is to encourage local companies to commission each other where possible, pulling together to build a critical mass.

Legitimisation from the wider business community helps. But before the rest of the UK will perceive Birmingham as a creative hub, Birmingham itself must believe it – at ground level. Manchester isn’t seen as a hotspot because faceless powers that be told us so – largely on the back of the heady Hacienda-fueled ‘90s and the swaggering pride of groups like Oasis, it pulsed out those vibes of its own accord. As Ruth points out, Birmingham has lacked such outspoken cultural figureheads to shout its potential from the rooftops.

But now the city’s making noises from its core – and they’re getting louder. Vibrant and diverse programmes from the likes of Fierce! and ArtsFest play their part in taking creativity out of the offices and into the streets, Supersonic goes from strength to strength on the back of its growing international profile, and it’s now joined by last weekend’s Soundstation and the upcoming BASS Festival in June. More4’s asylum-seeker drama Almost Adult was shot entirely in the city earlier this year – and with FILM Birmingham keen to create a film-friendly environment, it promises to be the first of many.

There’s a long way to go before ‘Birmingham’ becomes a buzzword for young, creative dynamism in the way that ‘Milan’ – its industrial Italian counterpart – has become synonymous with design. But for a catch-all term like ‘creative city’ to mean anything, it should be a gradual accumulation of reputations on various levels – from design to music to film and beyond – and not an empty moniker slapped onto us from above.

This article was published in The Birmingham Post, Monday June 12th 2006