Tony Seddon talks us through his "who's who" of 20th Century graphic design

Without wishing to sound like a pretentious little shit, when a book arrived entitled Greetings from Retro Design, I have to say I did a pretentious little internal sigh. Perhaps rather unfairly, “retro” has become something of a dirty word, connoting brands or enterprises desperately clawing at a carefully identified young “target market” that appears to have a penchant for buying overpriced second hand clothes in Brick Lane and fetishising ephemera from a youth they probably never lived through.

However, if we look at retro rather differently in this context, as a connotation-free way of just looking at design styles of the past, things become rather more interesting. Tony Seddon, who wrote and designed the book, says: “[Retro] was being used in a generic sense to describe any number of historical graphic design styles. What is a true 1950s look, as opposed to a 1940s or 1930s look? This book aims to address that question.”

And while of course any number of pages will never be able to explain the intricacies of an entire discipline over an entire decade, what it can do is contextualise certain much-aped styles and show you where they’re done best. That’s where Greetings from Retro Design (which takes its name from the Greetings From… postcards of the 1940s) succeeds: in offering a wealth of stunning imagery that prove, if anything, how brilliant original works that have often spawned some less brilliant imitators really are.

“Sometimes a brief requires you to create a parody of something, but you need to look at it as a point of reference, and carry it forward,” says Tony. “You have to come up with a contemporary take that might have something of the essence [of an older design] and bring it up to the present day. Some of the work people like Paul Rand or Saul Bass did is still around – it hasn’t been changed at all, and they’re the real success stories.”

The book is set out as a design timeline, spanning from 1900-1999. Three designers per decade have been selected as key representatives or pioneers of the design style of those ten years, producing a simple run-through of a “who’s who” of 20th Century design. Tony says the decades that particularly excite him in design terms are the 1920s and 1930s, “partly because some of the most exciting leaps forward [happened then], with things like Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus posters.”

Where very different designers such as Studio Dumbar and Neville Brody in the 1980s, Paul Rand and Saul Bass in the 1950s, Herbert Matter in the 1930s and Tibor Kalman in the 1990s are united is through the fact that each piece of work still looks breathtakingly fresh. So perhaps, in that sense, the book isn’t about “retro” design at all, but simply about “good” design instead.

Greetings from Retro Design is published by Thames & Hudson on 2 February.