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Ian Anderson, The Designers Republic
‘When I took a back seat to allow TDR to grow beyond me, it died; its creative spark was crushed . . . the more I took myself out of the equation to see if it could do better without me, the more obvious it became that Ian Anderson and The Designers Republic were inseparable.’
The background
Born in Croydon, just south of London, on Valentine’s Day, 1961, Ian Anderson was still at school when he designed his first record cover – an EP for his punk band, the Infra Red Helicopters, released on his own label, Buy These Records. In 1979, he moved to Yorkshire to read philosophy at Sheffield University and soon became a central figure in the city’s burgeoning music and club scene. When Person to Person (whom he managed) signed to Epic Records, he designed their album cover. Their ‘High Time’ single (1984) was his first widely distributed cover design: ‘I hand-drew and Letraset the design for the Epic Records art department to follow, although I had no real idea of how or what they did’ . . . in January 2009, after 23 years of trading, TDR went into voluntary liquidation. Anderson bought back the company’s name and assets and TDR’s next phase is already up and running. This new incarnation will be, according to Anderson, ‘a creative-led, brain-aided, design “A-Team”’. Clients already signed include Coca-Cola, the Experimenta Lisbon Biennale and Jarvis Cocker. With control of all TDR’s back catalogue, Anderson is also busy compiling a book that has been almost two decades in the making.
The interview
Liz Farrelly: Your earliest work was made using traditional techniques, but looked like it was digital, even before computers could produce such images; you’ve called it a ‘faux computer aesthetic’. Were you attempting to invent the future?
Ian Anderson: Inventing the future in terms of creating a blank canvas still waiting to be written; a sci-fi ‘what if?’; a place where we could define the rules and warp them at our leisure, creating a sense of optimism, of technology starring as the last magic of utopia; a playground for language and ideas not bound to the here and now. That for me is the future; it’s about expectation, and now it has gone.
LF: Where did your vision of a ‘future’ aesthetic come from?
IA: The aesthetic was a visual shorthand distilled from sci-fi films, television series, comics and books, from The Lost Planet to Doctor Who, to Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, UFO, Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet. It was the moon landing and every airbrushed paperback cover for a Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov novel. It was NASA, and optical character recognition. It was everything in that realm filtered through one person’s taste, choice, vision and understanding, and presented as a consumable, digestible, inclusive visual language. We aimed to create stuff that immediately ‘looked’ futuristic.
The inspiration, motivation, drive, starting point for my work is pop culture: why people do what they do, why they believe what they believe, what enriches their lives, and why and how that can be tapped into – what makes people tick. Then the question is, how can visual communication detonate that, and how does the role of the designer work as a sponge for information, and a projector or a megaphone to present that information in a targeted, desirable, consumable form.
LF: At one time you worried that TDR had ‘too tight a visual aesthetic’. What did you mean?
IA: There are times when every designer is seduced by excessive form over function. There are times when the process becomes too focused on the pleasure of doing, ultimately for the sake of doing. When we forget to ask ‘why?’ beyond ‘why the fuck are you using that font?’, we lose our way. When a visual aesthetic becomes too embedded in the way we do what we do, then it restricts our ability to deliver . . . either because we lose sight of the mission, or because the [potential] client can’t see beyond the eye candy . . .
LF: You were quoted as saying: ‘We find it difficult to do anything simple . . . detail has almost become an obsession’ (‘Go-faster graphics’, Eye no. 16 vol. 4). Does that still stand? Did that approach make it difficult to turn a profit?
IA: The devil is in the detail, and more is definitely more, but sometimes less is better. The detail has become less an output than part of a thinking process. It depends at which point your thinking engages with the tools and the means of expression and production. People always tell me I think out loud. I formulate and rationalise my ideas throughout a conversation, which can be quite disconcerting for new clients.. . .
. . .
LF: You’ve called TDR ‘an individual vision’. How did that work when you had a studio of up to thirteen people?
IA: It didn’t. I had a new business manager attempting to direct brand articulation, so I chose to take a step back.
LF: Is the next stage essentially just you and a small team?
IA: Yes; a small, perfectly formed and purpose-friendly team. I’m happy for it to take a little time to get into its stride, let the dust settle, find the right clients and projects.
LF: You often take criticism personally. Is that because you have a strong sense of ownership of TDR’s work – even if it’s for a client, it’s ‘personal work’. Is that what made it difficult for the expanded version of the company, with account handlers, to succeed?
IA: I believe passionately about what TDR does. When I took a back seat to allow it to grow beyond me, it died; its creative spark was crushed under the weight of business self-interest. I’m not saying I was blameless, it’s just that the more I tried to take myself out of the equation to see if TDR could grow better without me, the more obvious it became that Ian Anderson and The Designers Republic were inseparable. There is a strong sense of ownership and ‘auteur-ship’ in TDR’s output. We originate and develop the creative content, direction and vision. When it works best, the end result is entirely a tdr interpretation of the client’s needs.
Looking at the work over the years you can imagine the battles fought to get the clients on side and on board, so obviously we’re going to get a little possessive, a little precious. If there’s nothing of the creator in the creation, there’s no point for anyone concerned, is there?
I’ve never seen it as anything less than a mission to communicate by any means necessary, to ask questions, to provoke responses, to engage, to create dialogue, enlighten, debate, connect, in whatever medium, to whatever audience. But it’s something that is difficult to teach people within an organisation, if they don’t already get it, or just don’t want to. I’m not saying the work we have delivered in recent years hasn’t been good, exceptional even. It’s just that the quality of the output was becoming difficult to maintain, for everyone, because of the dynamic of the set-up . . .
To read the interview in full – plus Ian Anderson’s revealing commentary on a selection of TDR’s work through its 23-year existence – see the print version of Eye no. 71 vol 18. |
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