Tag Archives: Eye Magazine

Illustration

Eleven: David Driver

I learned more about collaboration and commissioning in the three years that I worked for David Driver than at any other point in my career. It was about finding talented people and letting them bring their gifts to whatever project you were working on. It was about enjoying your work. It was about honing your skills.

in 2014 Simon Esterson and I went to David’s house to talk to him about his career, with some vague thoughts about the fact that he had never really been profiled. There was an excellent two-part post on Mike Dempsey’s wonderful Graphic Journey blog, and some pen pictures in various books about the Radio Times, but not much of significance. That was odd, as he had given many well-known designers and illustrators important breaks in their careers. I had talked to David when profiling his long-time colleague Peter Brookes for Eye, and Simon was certain that it would be valuable to at least start a conversation with David.

We had a riotously enjoyable meeting that lasted four hours and left with hilariously unrepeatable stories about working for the BBC, The Times and the radical press of the Sixties. It would take four years before it made it into print, bolstered by two more equally enjoyable meetings. The profile finally found a home in the second of two issues of Eye devoted to Magazines, which came out in November 2018.

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I talked to various designers and writers about David, and parts of what they emailed me were used in the profile. The great English designer Robert Priest, who has mostly worked and lived in New York wrote a very thoughtful and punchy piece about David’s influence, which I’ll run in full here. Priest worked with David Driver at Welcome Aboard and Radio Times.

“The role of the editorial art director in Britain changed in the 1970s. It was influenced by the work of Tom Wolsey at Town in the 60s but was more fully realized a decade later with the emergence of a new breed of art director who was not just a visual journalist but a bona fide journalist in all senses of the word. They were well educated and savvy and wanted more of an influence on their magazine’s content. Leading the charge were Michael Rand and David King at The Sunday Times Magazine, David Hillman at Nova and David Driver at Radio Times, the journal of the BBC. 

“As a young designer at the time I was tremendously excited by their work, and that of their American counterpart, George Lois at Esquire. I was fortunate enough to become a magazine art director (back when it was the top title in the art department) at the age of 23 at Conde Nast’s Wine & Food and did my best to learn on the job until I met David Driver a year or two later. David had created an in-flight magazine for BOAC for Cornmarket Press and was doing things I’d never seen before. He combined a big picture vision with an attention to detail that was incredible.

“I went to see him on Conduit Street and found him be a larger-than-life character. Tall, with long curly hair and extremely funny, he welcomed me into his world. David always kept a small coterie of lieutenants around him. People he trusted. Just as he did with artists and photographers, always a limited roster of contributors who understood his vision. I wanted to work for him, despite being a number one already, because I wanted to observe his process and to find out how he came up with such great ideas, but there were no jobs available at the time. Soon after, however, David joined Radio Times and recommended that I follow him as art Director of Welcome Aboard. He didn’t interfere from afar but I always felt his support and influence. 

“In 1975 I had my own design consultancy and David asked me to redesign the TV and radio listings in Radio Times. One thing led to another and I went to work for him at last. I became one of his lieutenants.

“David worked very closely with the editor, Geoffrey Cannon to fashion the content of the publication. It was a double act and they were a formidable couple. They demanded that stories be conceived both editorially and visually from day one. David would expect complete information from the other editors at the magazine when we started working on a feature. If it wasn’t delivered precisely David would crush the editor with frightening efficiency. In more than a few instances they were unable to respond at all, having not thought the idea through, and were forced to skulk out of David’s office, often in tears. Not pretty but extremely effective. 

“In 1977 David was offered the job of Art Director of Weekend Magazine in Toronto. After much thought, he decided to turn it down, but a mutual friend recommended me for the job and I was pleased to accept. I would try to put what I’d learned under David into practice. I’ve been trying ever since.”

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Design etc

Interlude: Living in the Present

Twenty Over Eighty: Conversations on
a Lifetime in Architecture and Design
By Aileen Kwun and Bryn Smith
Princeton Architectural Press, £21.99 (paperback, 224pp)
Designed by Paul Wagner

Written for Eye Magazine, 2017

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You want inspiration? Buy this book! It’s as simple as that. This entire review could be taken up with vivid and quotable insights from any one of the interviews that Aileen Kwun and Bryn Smith have put together here, cleverly visiting a demographic often sidelined – asking twenty giants in the fields of design and architecture for their wisdom as they look back from the perspective of spending eight decades on the planet.

These are people who have been, in different ways, totally devoted to their work – it’s inseparable from their lives. From textiles to furniture, graphics and illustration to architecture, their age unshackles them from being polite or politic. Starting with the ninety-one-year-old writer and educator, Ralph Caplin, who came to design via a humour magazine, it finishes with eighty-eight-year-old architectural planner and all-round mover and shaker Beverly Willis, who wrote and directed her first film, about women architects, in 2009 at the age of eighty.

The authors set out this elegantly-designed book as a series of conversations, some in person, some via email exchanges. As young design writers, they worried that it would be impossible to “capture the essence of twenty legends… for a conversation worth their time, and yours.” However, with astute questioning and careful editing, they turn the varied responses into a satisfyingly fluent and coherent read.

And – not to put too fine a point on it – the project is timely. Here’s a chance to catch up with people who were influential at one time, but who have somewhat fallen off the radar – the late architect Michael Graves, left partially paralysed by illness, tries to “redesign the healthcare experience… from the unique viewpoint of a patient” which leaves him splenetic about firms who do a lot of work in that field, as they’ve “never been in a wheelchair – what they’re doing is making interiors, like a hotel. Interiors.”

Or the riveting story of Charles Harrison, from post-war US Army cartographer to the first African American executive at Sears, designing thousands of user-friendly products, including the moulded plastic garbage bin that probably sits outside your house – essentially identical to that invented by Harrison in 1966.

Milton Glaser is, as always, outrageously quotable… “Nobody tells you you’re an artist. ‘I’m an artist.’ There it is, and nobody can take it away from you. Isn’t it remarkable? You couldn’t do that if you were a brain surgeon.” “I believe that art and design are like sex and love. They are fine independently… and every once in a while you get both at once. But not often.” “My essential mantra in professional life is: do no harm. Which is very complicated…”

And there’s much about the centrality of good teaching, whether in the classroom or studio. Here’s Bob Gill: “These people in my class haven’t originated anything, they’ve been told what to do. So the first thing I tell them is, I will hate everything you do, but I love you, so that’ll make it easier. And I really do like them, and I really do hate everything they ever do.” The brilliant Denise Scott Brown, one of the authors of Learning from Las Vegas, insists that what designers and architects “really badly need is a School for Clients!”

Phyllis Lambert, who lobbied her father in 1954 to hire Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram building – writing him an eight-page, single-spaced screed – is asked, “When did you first become curious about art and architecture?” and replies, “As a child. Children are pretty smart; they don’t go around with nothing in their heads.”

Michael Carabetta, who commissioned the book, feels that all of the interviewees “prove Newton’s Law – a body in motion tends to stay in motion. There’s little that surprises them. They’ve seen it all, or enough to know what makes the world tick. That’s knowledge. And once they have that knowledge, they learn there is always more to learn.” Indeed, a common thread running through the book is of looking forward to “the next job,” and there’s a shared sense of not looking back or resting on their laurels.

Ricardo Scofidio (81), whose recent projects include the overhaul of Lincoln Centre in New York in 2013 and the creation of that city’s High Line, says that, for him, “the most difficult thing has been to live in the present, and to resist thinking about what the future will look like.”

Much of their work still seems, if not futuristic, relatively untouched by time. Kettles, lights, buildings, logos, posters, theories and more – if you want to know what twenty lifetimes of excellent work in the visual/spatial field looks like, and what those lifetimes have taught the practitioners, this book is for you.

There’s a nice Vimeo flick through the book here. If you’re interested in the longevity of creativity, I’d recommend this book as an essential purchase. Reprinted by kind permission of Eye.

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Illustration, Interludes

Interlude: Concrete Canvas

Outdoor Gallery – New York City
By Yoav Litvin
Designed by Steven Mosier
Gingko Press, $39.95, £34.50

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Written for Eye Magazine, Summer 2015

When a Banksy original turns up (usually prised off a wall) and sells for £300,000, and when today’s newspaper reports on a London opening for the work of the Mexican street-art collective Lapiztola, we know that graffiti has come in from the cold. In October 2013 Banksy even had a month-long ‘residency’ in New York, saying that he was there ‘for the spirit and audacity’.

It is that vibrant culture, an integral part of a city in a league of its own in terms of urban canvas material, that the photographer and writer Yoav Litvin aims to capture in Outdoor Gallery – New York City (Gingko Press, $39.95, £34.50, designed by Steven Mosier).

Litvin succeeds, not only because of the breadth of styles his photographs show but also because of the richness of the stories behind the paint and stencils. These artists include teachers, parents, loners and fashion designers. They are not all young and alienated. A surprising number are women. Some are older than you may imagine, having been stencilling and spraying for more than 30 years.

Their eloquence is impressive, their influences wide-ranging; Rauschenberg and Basquiat may well be expected, Norman Rockwell and the German Expressionist Käthe Kollwitz less so.

The Yok traces the movement back to cave art. Some are inspired by other street artists: the abstract work of Hellbent, for example – powerful geometric shapes which cover industrial walls (top) – is influenced by the Brazilian street artist Zezão.

The book dispenses some useful bits of information along the way: Brooklyn is safer to operate in than Manhattan; the police are often ignorant of the laws regarding public painting, and some large works have increased the value of the property on which they are painted.

There is much striking work here, work that plays with scale or makes pointed social comment. Asked about the materials she uses, Jilly Ballistic, who creates site-specific work using historical photographs in the NYC subway, offers a list that includes: Wit. Humour. Honesty. Ink. X-Acto knife. Hands. Adhesive. History. Consumerism. New York itself.

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An online gallery of the work featured in the book can be seen at yoavlitvin.com. Reprinted by kind permission of Eye.

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Illustration

Ten: Peter Brookes

brookesspread

I was thrilled to see a profile that I wrote for John L Walters and Simon Esterson at eye magazine in print this week. Last year I visited Peter in his office at The Times and spent a fascinating couple of hours talking to him about his career in illustration and cartooning, below a wall covered in stunning examples of his art and craft. I was lucky enough to have met Peter as I started out in magazine design, at my first proper job, in the art department of Radio Times. By then, he had worked with its brilliant Art Director, David Driver, for a decade, and his approach to problems and his enjoyment of finding creative solutions rubbed off on the whole team. “Happy days!”, said Peter as we talked about that part of his career, and they were. As I left, I noticed a stack of previous cartoons, topped off with his brilliant Michael Gove/Boris Johnson “Et tu, Brute” from a few weeks before, memorably summing up Gove’s disastrous entry into the Tory leadership battle.

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Interludes

Interlude: Jazz. New York in the Roaring Twenties

Jazz. New York in the Roaring Twenties
Robert Nippoldt, Hans-Jürgen Schaal
Hardcover with CD, 8.5 x 13.4 in., 144 pages, £ 34.99

Review from Eye Magazine, Autumn 2013taschenjazz3

Handsome may be the word to describe this book, conceived by German illustrator Robert Nippoldt, a lavish telling of the story of Jazz in New York. Texts about the movers and shakers of the Jazz world at that time – Henderson, Hawkins, Ellington, Whiteman et al – are added to pieces on recording techniques and important locations, to summon up the glories of the Uptown world of Jazz in Manhattan in the era of Gatsby. Perhaps that explains its translation into English now, as it originally appeared in 2007 in Germany. These texts are set against Nippoldt’s slightly crude hatched felt pen-like drawings, all done in black, brown and beige (to quote a Duke Ellington Suite).

Of course, the problem with handsome is that handsome is a lot about the facade. There are dynamic spreads that are seductive as you glance through, but on examination appear a little flimsy. This book, created art-first with a luxurious flatplan giving the drawings primacy over the space, somehow doesn’t quite justify its size – even with the layers of fact boxes detailing recording careers and instruments played. These cute little touches – the use of musicians’ signatures, instrument symbols and small drawings of the main players dropped into the text where their name appears – are nice, but the attention to detail falters when it comes to the type, with a truly nasty italic choice.

For every lovely touch (audience shadows on the front of Armstrong’s stage, reminiscent of The Watchmen), there’s a rather rotoscoped Joe Venuti. For every vivid Manhattan nightscape, there’s a clunkily drawn cornet, not working hard enough for the space it occupies. There are some cool graphic ideas. There’s a nice map of Manhattan showing the locations of the Hot Nitespots, and a brace of spreads with the waveforms of the 20 songs from the attached CD, along with a timing graph (only “Rhapsody In Blue”, commissioned by Paul Whiteman from George Gershwin, is over 3 minutes 20 seconds, and continues by itself onto the second spread).

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But, looming over all drawings of old musicians, is the great Robert Crumb. Looking back at Crumb you understand what’s missing here – it’s that lunatic passion that inhabits Crumb’s line, that puts fire in the eyes of his portraits. In Nippoldt’s hands they’re  pleasant enough photo-derived graphic representations, but they’re not really alive. And the same goes for the text, a good enough introduction to the subject (albeit not impressive to the jazz scholars that I ran it past), but somewhere between the vivacity of a true comic-book tale and a proper work of scholarship. In the end I didn’t quite know who it was intended for or where it will find its audience. Certainly anyone with more than a passing interest in Jazz would enjoy being reminded of these composers and singers and players, but whether they’d indulge the pages of blown-up record surfaces or annotated drawings of old gramophones, I’m not sure. According to the note at the back, “[Nippoldt’s] screwball book projects put the fear of God into him and his publishers”. I can see why.

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