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David King [extract]
‘You develop a visual style as you would a handwriting one . . . The content is what you concentrate on’
For the past three decades David King has moved deftly between roles as designer, photographer, editor, researcher and author. His graphic style – an easily recognisable mix of explosive sans serif typography, solid planes of vivid colour and emphatic rules – reworked for the New Left in Britain the graphic language of the Russian Constructivists.
King was born in 1943, and studied at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts (now London College of Printing) under Robin Fior, who describes King’s approach as ‘compare and contrast as a political stance’. As art editor of The Sunday Times Magazine from 1965-75, he collaborated with art director Michael Rand to create the new language of the supplement: features sporting dynamic picture cropping and processed graphic effects gave the magazine a cinematic feel. King forged important friendships with other Sunday Times contributors. With Francis Wyndham he compiled the first pictorial biography of Leon Trotsky (1972). King began supplying his own pictures to the Sunday Times, and an assignment with Muhammad Ali in 1974 resulted in the book I am King.
In the mid-1970s King began designing posters for organisations such as Apartheid in Practice and the National Union of Journalists. These works demonstrate a flair for extracting the most from tight budgets – ‘additional’ colours were cheated by overprinting; the impact of photos was boosted by printing two colours dot-on-dot. The onset of glasnost brought increased interest in the collection of Soviet-related images which King had been building since the early 1970s. The David King Collection is now the largest of its kind in the Western world, boasting over a quarter of a million pictures. Posters from the collection are on display in a room of their own, Soviet Graphics, at London’s Tate Modern. King has always intended that the collection should present alternatives to a Stalinist reading of Russian history – an aim carried further by his recent books The Commissar Vanishes (1997) and Ordinary Citizens (2003).
This interview took place at his London home, where we sat between a basement stuffed with the products of his design past, and floors weighed down by the research materials of his present and future.
Wilson: When you were a student at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, the design department was split into Commercial Design and Typography. What made you choose the latter?
King: The head of graphic design, Tom Eckersley, said that the typography course was better. But I was rather vague. On the first morning we were given an introductory message: ‘Now that you’ve all decided to become typographers . . . ’ I didn’t know what a typographer was – as far as I was concerned, I’d gone along with some paintings! But I enjoyed the first year, because there was very little typography. It was mainly drawing and basic design. What was brilliant about that course was that Eckersley, whom you’d call a poster designer, was very wide-ranging in that he employed people from all different styles and backgrounds to teach. You’d get ten different lecturers a week. So as a seventeen-year-old who’s finding life rather tormented, there were bound to be one or two people whom you could relate to. I definitely related to Robin Fior, who was very politically motivated and influential.
Wilson: Fior mentioned to me that your prime mentor at college was Bill Brandt’s brother Rolf.
King: I learned from Rolf more than anybody, because he was much less of a typographer and much more about visual thinking. He taught basic design in the abstract: materials, composition, colour, the relationship between art and nature. It was about forcing yourself to look. He’d studied at [painter Amédée] Ozenfant’s academy in Shaftesbury Avenue in the 1930s. Rolf was fantastically good-looking, and paid his way by getting walk-on parts in the theatre – his accent got him the work, because criminals always had strong German accents. He’d rush from the academy to the theatre, make himself up for an hour, say ‘Bang – you’re dead’, then have the rest of the evening off. Fantastic. But out of loyalty to Rolf, we never used to mention Bill.
Wilson: In case there was a rivalry there?
King: There was no rivalry; we just admired Rolf so much that we weren’t particularly interested in Bill. [Hard German accent] ‘My brother Billy, he gets so angry when he is not called English.’ And of course Bill had just as strong a German accent as Rolf did . . .
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