Before First Things First
I’m not the kind of designer that sells design magazines, nor should I be.
When I took a stance against the repeat of the First Things First Manifesto republished in 2000 from the original proposed in 1964, I opposed many of my idols and former bosses. Tibor Kalman, Gert Dumbar, Simon Esterson, Nick Bell and Vince Frost, my teachers Lucienne Roberts, Katherine McCoy and Rick Poynor. These people taught me all I know, they were and still are the best of the best at what I dreamed of doing.
So why did I feel compelled, in the fourth year of my career after exiting the RCA, to disagree?
It’s now more than 20 years ago and it’s still complex – but my major disagreement was based on two irrefutable facts:
The design business depends almost entirely on slight margins to keep a business afloat. Every designer, including the cosignatories on the manifesto had built a career and sustained a business doing commercial work for profit. Most of the responsibility for delivering commercial work as I had experienced fell on the lowest paid designers within the business.
Design is in essence commercial art, from Rodchenko forward, design rose from pragmatism and commerce. Even modern design evolved from the working class ethic of printing and layout, without separation between advertising, promotion, packaging, editorial and type design, art direction and design technology. To present a false separation denies the proletariate roots of design and saves it for a class of people that have Money,
“Geography and commerce wield great influence upon the affairs of people. Even the development of the alphabet may have been an act of geography, for the Phoenician city-states became a hub in the ancient world and the crossroads of international trade.“ – Meggs History of Graphic Design
I had experienced, when working for brilliant designers the often untold tension between keeping a studio profitable and doing work that needed to be done.
It was Simon Esterson who best rationalize the argument for First Things First in a way that really resonated with me – saying, and I paraphrase. “for so long designers have to put the essential work behind the commercial work, this is calling to reverse that, to say that it is imperative that design empowers the work that needs to be done in society.” It is a compelling argument as one would expect from Simon who is such a compelling Human Being. But I’d already worked on Dresdner Bank for Studio Dumbar under Gert, in 1997 and had to argue that my salary was less than my rent. I’d also worked on Standard Hotel for Tibor Kalman yet earned nothing more than a stipend and free food from Florent.
I’m not complaining – I look back at every moment of teaching, every tough critique and realize that I gained a valuable post-post graduate at cut price. But I also knew that my bank balance was in the red, that several Design Luminaries had not paid me for the work I had done and I knew that any career had to pay for the essentials of living and food.
This came to a head when Edward Booth Clibborn the notorious publisher asked me to come work for him. The offer sounded attractive, but in the details I realized that Booth-Clibborn was offering me work but paying me in studio space. He expected me to work for nothing. Looking back, design was rife with unpaid work, shrouded as apprenticeship but without the business logic to support a graduate.
In 1999 I felt like the design industry was a lie. I had the impression that success was carefully curated to show the things that we all aspire to do, without showing the necessary work to get there. Worse, design was selling a lie to graduates that had little to no hope of executing work of uncommercial quality unless they had another source of income.
This was underscored when Tibor, who I was working for at the time said to me that he had to let me go. Saying that he needed to have people on his team with their own financial resources rather than people who needed to be paid.
I remember that week vividly in my mind. I had no idea what I was going to do next. Having left a wonderful position working for Mark Porter at the Guardian to work for my design hero. So I plucked up the courage to confront Tibor; I asked him “so what am I supposed to do now?’ – he replied “you’re smart, you must have loads of offers” I said and I’m ashamed that I did, “No, nothing, well I have an offer to work with Wieden & Kennedy but I can’t work in advertising”. I had fallen for the prevailing narrative, I believed the lie that I was being told that commercialism, advertising and design were separate and that one part was somehow dirtier than the other.
Tibor then shouted at me so loudly the whole studio could hear. “People who have everything and people who have nothing have the luxury of choice, you are neither. You have no choice”, “Go, make it into something interesting, use you fucking mind to make it better” – Tibor had just sent me to an ad agency. I only learned several years later that Tibor had directed a spot for Nike with Wieden & Kennedy.
On the plane to Wieden and Kennedy Amsterdam I was so nervous about not understanding advertising that I cut the products from adverts in The Face Magazine to see what an advert was. I’d vowed to myself never to use manipulation to sell something, but only demonstrate the design intent of the product. When I arrived at Wieden & Kennedy I met the most talented set of designers, spearheaded by the great Robert Nakata. They already knew what I had learned on the plane; that design and advertising were deeply connected. And that intent was the separator. With good intent comes good design. With good intent, comes good advertising.
It was during in my first year in Amsterdam working for Wieden & Kennedy that the ‘First Things First Manifesto’ was published. I remember reading it in the common room at Kaizersgracht. I couldn’t connect the words written with the Signatories.
“We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.” – First Things First Manifesto 2000
Tibor had just sent me to an advertising agency. Studio Dumbar was working with Jung Van Mat on Dresdner Bank.
“We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication – a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.” – First Things First Manifesto 2000
I was so broke by working for designers who didn’t pay me enough to live and the same designers were signing a manifesto telling me that my new job had no merit. This manifesto proposed the split between the prosaic roots of commercial art and a more noble design which did things of value.
The thing that confounds me to this day is that no-one presented a business model that could support the vision. With one exception Simon, he had paid me well and educated me, always looking after the people he hired. Editorial was a design business that had noble intentions and a business plan. Unfortunately I know now that the business of editorial design rather depended on the advertising revenue which supported the publications, this business has now also evaporated.
I decided then to see no distinction between the various skills sets of design. Today, they have further diversified, as my good friend Peter Markatos stated, ”Design inherently is cross-functional, why do we cut it into pieces?”. The craft and intention I learnt at Wieden & Kennedy, the emotional story telling I learned from Dan Wieden, Kim Papworth and Tony Davidson. The design skill and product demonstration I learned from Robert Nakata and Harmine Louwe. The art of conceptualization and craft that I learned from John Hegarty are all unparalleled. They are as valuable as the design systems thinking that Simon Esterson drilled into me, or the form-giving muscle that Gert Dumbar pushed me to learn. They have all come together in my most recent work.
Ultimately my short career in advertising righted my mind-set as much as my bank balance and I was able to do creative work which was as good as, if not better than the work I did with Tibor. Some of which had a lasting impact on culture.
I’ve spent the last 20 years involving myself as much in the business that drive design as the quality of the work. I have learned that a manifesto with a roadmap and plan is worth more than intent alone. I have helped the design businesses I belonged to navigate the problems of growth and capitalization. I am planning the next phase of design businesses which can support good work and the employees.
And in the last ten years I’ve helped launched businesses that have been built on design but have a business model and product which creates long term value. Matternet, which I helped launch in 2011, is a system of autonomous flying vehicles that deliver diagnostic samples beyond the reach of all season roads, it was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2014 and it is still going strong without me. I am as proud of the design work created alongside the wonderful Ido Baruchin which was shown in the Design Museum as I am the business plan hatched out with the CEO Andreas Raptopulous to create a more efficient way to deliver urgent diagnostic samples in urban areas.
My future as a designer, isn’t on the covers of magazines, or as a signatory on a manifesto spelling out the further dissection of design into good and bad. It is in working to create systems of business which can afford the luxury of great design and deliver the value to people who need and deserve a better outcome.