Books, Design and Culture
Mike Dempsey interviews innovative and influential production designer Alex McDowell who started out screen-printing t-shirts for Vivienne Westwood before going on to work with film directors such as Terry Gilliam and David Fincher (and with Tim Pope on that wardrobe video for The Cure):
RSA Royal Designers: Alex McDowell Interview mp3
(It’s a fascinating conversation but it took me several attempts to download what is quite a long interview, so I hope it works better for you!)
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Mike Dempsey interviews renowned British designer Michael Wolff, co-founder of the Wolff Olins Agency, for the RSA’s RDinsights series:
RSA Insights: Michael Wolff Interview mp3
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As follow up to yesterday’s post, here’s Mike Dempsey in conversation with industrial designer Kenneth Grange in a fascinating interview for the RSA from 2009:
RCA: Kenneth Grange 2009 Interview
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Simplicity and Economy — Mike Dempsey profiles Keith Cunningham, who designed book covers for Peter Owen, for the Foyles bookshop blog:
A tight discipline can galvanise a creative designer’s mind and Cunningham rose to the occasion with his very first cover for Peter Owen.
This sparse graphic approach was to become the visual hallmark of Peter Owen covers in the 60s and 70s. Over a relatively short period Cunningham quickly created a highly individual ‘brand’ (before the term was used) via the houses jackets distinguished by their utter simplicity and economy.
There is a much longer profile of Cunningham on Dempsey’s own (and excellent) blog Graphic Journey.
Movement and Sound — Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, offers advice on how to film comics:
Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they’re two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you’re always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting. The language of cinema and comics is different, even though they both use images. In comics, you write with images; they’re like pictograms. And in a movie you think about movement and sound and music, all those things that are not considerations when making comics.
Cutting to the Chase — Alan Moore discusses his new novel Jerusalem with Helen Lewis Hasteley of The New Statesman:
[W]hile his first prose novel, Voice of the Fire (published in the mid-1990s), took 300 pages to cover the county of Northamptonshire, Jerusalem uses 750,000 words to explore an area of Northampton about half a square mile across. “So the next one will be several million words and it’ll just be about this end of the living room.”
Moore says he hopes never to write anything as long as Jerusalem again but he won’t countenance scaling it back. “Any editor worth their salt would tell me to cut two-thirds of this book but that’s not going to happen. I doubt that Herman Melville had an editor — if he had, that editor would have told him to get rid of all that boring stuff about whaling: ‘Cut to the chase, Herman.'”
And finally…
Manual Labour — Peter Foge profiles philosopher Simone Weil, who work for a time in a steel plant and died of self-induced starvation in wartime London, for Lapham’s Quarterly:
Comments closedPart philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”
The dapper graphic designer Raymond Hawkey, whose innovative work at The Daily Express and The Observer changed the face of British newspapers in the post-war era, died last week aged of 80.
Hawkey’s modern graphic style also revolutionized British book cover design.
His stark black and white cover for Len Deighton’s 1962 Harry Palmer novel, The Ipcress File, which — with its chipped teacup, stubbed out cigarette and Smith & Wesson revolver — mixed violence with the everyday, became iconic despite initial opposition from the book’s horrified publisher Hodder & Stoughton.
Designer Mike Dempsey, who profiled Hawkey for Design Week in 2001, noted:
What Hawkey did with [The Ipcress File] was one of the key moments in design history. It is important to view this piece of work within the context of the period. Hawkey’s photographic use of inanimate objects to give a narrative dimension to the cover was startlingly new and made a dramatic impact on the publishing scene. The publisher, Hodder, found the design too spartan with its black and white photography, plain background and small undifferentiated typography, but both Deighton and Hawkey held firm. They were right, because on publication in 1962, The lpcress File sold out within 24 hours.
After the success of The Ipcress File, Hawkey became a sought-after book cover designer, working on more jackets for Deighton, as well as covers for Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis and Frederick Forsyth amongst others.
According to his obituary in The Guardian, Hawkey was a shy and quietly spoken man:
Comments closedBut in spite of his gentle voice and manner, once engaged in an assignment he was indefatigable, working 16 hours at a stretch, before sleeping briefly and putting in another 16-hour day in the flat where he lived for five decades. He was wonderfully generous, especially with his time, to young people who sought his advice, whether it was on design or writing – he wrote four very fine thrillers, including It (1983), regarded by many as the first truly modern ghost story.
A fastidious and private man, he had a dread of dying in hospital; and after a long illness he died in his own bed – with his beloved wife, Mary, reading his favourite poem to him.