An interview with the curator of the RCA's major graphic design show

Date
5 November 2014

In 1963, the Royal College of Art held an exhibition celebrating 15 years of the school of graphic design. In the show’s catalogue, Professor Richard Guyatt remembered the days when the term was adopted by the college. “With a certain sense of relief, but not much conviction, the name ‘Graphic Design’ was chosen,” he wrote. “No one was quite sure what it meant, but it had a purposeful ring…”

Fast forward 51 years and Richard Doust, curating a show celebrating 50 years of the discipline at the RCA, admits that while people now know what graphic design means, the task brings new challenges. “I think we’re flying by the wire – we’ve all got very red eyes,” he laughs.

Richard is working on the new Graphics RCA show with Adrian Shaughnessy and Teal Triggs, as well as his colleagues in the Visual Communication department. But Richard’s perspective is unique because not only has he taught at the RCA since 1986, he was a student there in the early 1960s.

“It was the place to be. The bar was legendary, the Rolling Stones did one of their first gigs here and there was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band that was famously the art college band. Other bands made big strides here and Hockney was around too."

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Brian Denyer: Poster (1963) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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John Pasche: Rolling Stones logo (1970) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

He came to the RCA after graduating from Brighton, pulled in by the chance to study under the legendary Anthony Froshaug.

“He was an incredibly inspirational teacher though he had very weird methods of teaching; mostly in the pub, not much in the studio. He didn’t really get on with anybody else. The others were a bit old-fashioned but Froshaug was a breath of fresh air, a completely different thinker. His teaching really was a mix of Bauhaus and Ulm and that sort of thing. He was very strict – you had to know exactly what you were doing and why you were doing something. And he taught us all sorts of interesting things, including maths which none of us had really mastered at school.”

The 1963 exhibition took place while Richard was a student and he remembers a furore over an issue of the RCA magazine Arc that featured Princess Margaret in a bra smoking a pipe. Because she was opening the exhibition, the college was swift to act. “You can’t get a copy of that magazine, that copy of Arc never existed. They pulped it!

“So that gave a thought as to what it was like in those days, the idea that you would possibly upset the Royal Family.”

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Jonathan Barnbrook: Poster (1990) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Dave Ellis: Poster (1987) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

The idea for the current show, which opens today, came about in the pub during a 20 year reunion, when Michele Januzzi pointed out it was 50 years since the first show.

“I came in very excitedly the next morning,” Richard remembers but the scale of the task soon became apparent. The RCA had drawers and drawers of posters from across the decades but unfortunately for Richard and his team they weren’t in any sort of order.

“We had hundreds of posters going way back but it was a bit of a nightmare because none of this stuff is attributed, nobody ever put the dates on. It was often just potluck that somebody turned up and said ‘I did that.’ Even now, we keep discovering posters that I have no idea where they’re from.”

They started to think about themes around which they could organise the work and while some things changed across the years – depending on the tutors, the state of the industry – other things remained the same.

“I guess one of the things that has followed all the way through, from my day, has been the letterpress workshop because that’s the thing we’ve clung onto with absolute determination. It’s been threatened so many times, and yet it comes right through the whole process as the thing that people come here to do.”

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Gill Bradleyr: Poster (1982) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Mark Bonner: Stamps (1991) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Nigel Robinson Poster (1990) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

But elsewhere you can trace the evolution of graphic design as a discipline. “It started off with most people going into advertising agencies so the course was very much based on the sorts of work you would need to produce in your portfolio in order to get a job.

“Then almost immediately into the late 1960s and 70s the whole thing about ideas came in. Famously Bob Gill who was teaching at the time told the students that you had to ring him up with your idea and if he didn’t understand it, it was no good. So there was a whole period – tyranny in fact – where the idea was the whole thing and that lasted until the late 70s.

“And then the work starts to become more personal; people really finding ways of doing things themselves and seeing what’s happening outside.”

This plays out through work from a host of top designers, from John Pasche who as an RCA student in 1971 designed the Rolling Stones lips logo to Morag Myserscough and Sophie Thomas, plus studios like A Practice for Everyday Life, Graphic Thought Facility and Why Not Associates.

And the past still informs the future, as Professor Neville Brody, Dean of School of Communication, explains. “We take great inspiration from the past both in the way we run the programme today and in our determination to create the dangerous minds of the future.”

Graphics RCA: Fifty Years runs until 22 December.

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Sara Fanelli: Poster (1994) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Mike Foreman: Poster (1963) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Ray Gregory: Poster (1971) from Graphics RCA: Fifty Years

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Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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