8 April 2012 | Blueprint, April 1984

Nick Butler: the product designer as anti-hero

Nick Butler died in early 2012. Here, in a rare and relatively early interview, he explains why, despite being one of Britain's most successful 20th century designers, he preferred to keep a low profile

Nick Butler is 42. He became a Royal Designer for Industry three years ago, and is widely regarded as one of Britain’s most distinguished design talents. Butler founded BIB Design Consultants, his practice, in 1967: today, based in Notting Hill, it has 32 employees, 10 company cars and a turnover well into the six figure range. Yet Butler doesn’t give interviews. This one, he intimates, is an unrepeatable exception.

What future is there for industrial designers? In Britain, educating the breed is a highly organised business, with more students being packed on to fewer courses each year. But the funds aren’t around to employ many industrial designers in this country, and you have to be very good indeed to get to the media nirvana in Milan. These days, freshly trained industrial designers are more likely to join the drones who slug it out with a soldering iron on £5000 a year in the Western Corridor than they are to be celebrated in the press. Setting up as trendy ‘designer/manufacturer’? That’s something which usually requires a private income. Going cooperative à la Livingstone? This is the hazardous endeavour of jewellery and fashion designers, not creators of scientific instruments and domestic appliances.

The magazines may portray a small, elite brand of (mainly Italian) industrial designers as superheroes, capable of singlehandedly dreaming up anything and having it made in massive volumes. Yet the reality of industrial design practice today is rather different. And Nick Butler, whose achievements in a whole variety of product sectors easily entitle him to a place in the pantheon of superheroes, is a good man to talk to about this paradox. He cares little for the hype surrounding industrial design, but lots about the substance of the discipline.

Butler first trained at Leeds College of Art and then went on to gain a first at London’s RCA. He took a fellowship in the States, did a stint on industrialised building systems at the GLC, and finally teamed up with Peter Isherwood and Stephen Bartlett to form BIB. After a while, Isherwood moved off to avionics, and, more recently, Bartlett has been away from BIB: he is a serious painter, and, though he is shortly to return to the company as a partner, a recent show of his work was a sell out. The core of BIB therefore remains Butler, poised equally between engineering and aesthetics.

‘You’ve got to understand engineering, even if you’re designing vases. But to have that understanding you don’t need to be an engineer’. Butler is adamant that mastery of engineering principles means more, not less freedom for designers: ‘We used to get shot down by clients over engineering details. Now we can reply to every question. That means we can put our ideas about more’.

This attitude - that a problem like engineering, which most design critics find rather tiresome, can actually turn out to be a solution - is characteristic of Butler. His line on similar ‘problems’, such as microelectronics, robot production techniques and even the recession, betrays a consistent optimism about the future. Chips are good because they release ‘sixty or seventy per cent of the constraints’: the size of television screens, for instance, need no longer be determined by cathode ray tube manufacturing technology, but by human needs. Robots are good because they allow designers to apply machining and finishing techniques which would normally be uneconomic, and because they open the way to products made in scores of different design variations - customised, almost. And the recession is good at least in the sense that it has forced companies to give industrial design the importance it has long deserved. ‘That way the prospects facing young designers are in fact better than ever’.

It’s hard to argue with Butler, because the physical evidence is there to show that he knows what he’s talking about. In engineering he has done heat exchangers for General Electric, medical equipment for Corning, marine radar for Decca. In electronics he has developed writing pads which computers can read. His gas welding torches for BOC were designed to be built by robots, and he is currently working on a robot built washing machine for a Japanese client (constructed entirely out of plastics, it will be made by a workforce of 22, to volumes of more than a million a year). Lastly, in terms of the recession, he has shown that the opportunities are there to be grabbed. Lean, heavily worked and hedged in by client confidentiality clauses that are getting tougher and tougher, BIB is nevertheless booming.

The strategy that has built the business is simple. Four fifths of BIB’s income comes from abroad - though the British share is on the rise at present. In overseas markets, BIB has always made a point of setting its rates higher than local ones, so as not to invite charges of undercutting indigenous consultancies. Result: a fair amount of money has poured in.

There is, however, more to the strategy than going overseas. Butler also stresses that industrial designers have generally been unable to win the big budgets that graphic designers are used to, if only because ‘they’re usually paid out of technical development or engineering, whereas graphics people swim around in advertising or marketing’. His trick has been to take industrial design to the Americans and the Japanese and get it put into the marketing loop. And in this he has been aided, he makes no secret, by ‘several young, zippy American graphics teams, people like Anspach Grossman Portugal. They’ve recommended us to US companies, and we them’.

Butler has been tempted to turn BIB in a multidisciplinary direction, but has found these informal arrangements with the world of graphics preferable to building his own team of professionals. Yet graphics is important to him. His impeccably reassuring industrial gas regulators, red and black and designed for BOC, boast not only improved pressure adjustment but also more intelligible graphics; his ultra cheap kitchen scales for Prestige have similar merits. More broadly, his work shows just as much appreciation of colour and form as any graphics man.

This is important, because Butler’s principal reputation has been built around capital, rather than consumer goods. In one respect the reputation has been deserved, because capital goods are the sort of unglamorous, unpublicised affair he revels in. But in another it has not. Butler’s scissors for Prestige are in millions of British homes, as are his drills for Black and Decker. Anyway his vacuum pumps look like coffee machines.

When he started in the late 1960s, Butler says, the bulk of his business was in capital goods. But since the recession and the explosion of High Street spending, the trend has been towards consumer goods - tempered only, most recently, with an upturn in capital goods as consumer goods manufacturers have begun to invest more heavily than in the past. Despite his reputation, therefore, a full 60 per cent of Butler’s business today comes from consumer goods. The story of his cameras for Minolta can’t be told yet; but the story of his torches for Duracell brings out very clearly his facility with consumer goods - his genius, in fact.

The torches, black and yellow and built with a beam that opens up like a cigarette lighter in reverse, were launched by the UK subsidiary of Duracell, the American battery makers, in November 1982. They now take 30 per cent of the European market for torches. The little one is made at 25,000 a day, 2.75 million a year. Two new models will be launched in June, cradle to production in eight months. Butler: ‘Duracell were enlightened clients - they’d never made anything but batteries before. We knew that play value was important: kids like to read comics with torches. We also knew that no designer had yet done a good torch. The brief was to sell batteries, so the solution had to be cheap. We thought: go for a light source, not a torch. We made a big model, put in the articulated head to give variable geometry, built the head round invisible internal plastics mouldings, found that it worked. Then we did the same again for the genuine article, this time with soft moulds. Nothing happened. The head wouldn’t budge’.

Eventually BIB fixed things. But despite much coaxing, the UK moulders of the torch failed to deliver. Now Duracell has built new plants in Belgium and Italy, with another due in Canada, to make up. End of tale.

Butler can be scathing about British industry. He praises TI’s recent £8m investment in robotics (unveiled by the secretary of state for trade and industry, Norman Tebbit, only the other week). But he complains that, through Raleigh, the company is still making too many different types of bike designs. ‘Ten years ago they had ten thousand models. Now they’re pleased that the figures “only” fifteen hundred’.

The Japanese, by contrast, have these things sorted out: though the Americans may soon overtake them in robotics, they’re already doing the customised design variations bit. ‘In Japan market analysis and financial clout are integrated in a way that they aren’t in Britain. The banks and the lifestyle analysts are on the same floor of the same company. Manufacturing is just a means to an end. If the market’s there, they can mobilise even the enormous funds that are needed for getting into robotics’.

But the Japanese have their own worries - especially in the realm of single lens reflex cameras, one of their most famous strengths. Butler is fascinating about this. The world market for SLRs is saturated, with Japan exporting 70 per cent of domestic output. Therefore companies like Minolta face a dilemma. Should they try to stimulate demand by adopting the new product technology of Sony’s Mavica, or should they wait for Kodak to bring out 1500 ASA film? The Mavica route means buying and then, for quality’s sake, improving on Sony’s licenses, which contain the secret of how to plug cameras into TVs and facsimile machines. 1500 ASA may mean an end to the use of flash and indeed threatens, if that is the right word, to turn photography into a simple pinhole camera affair once more. In practice, Butler says, the Japanese are not sure what to do, which is why holding operations like disk-based cameras are enjoying momentary popularity.

If, therefore, the British plastics industry cannot get it together to make British-designed Duracell torches, the Japanese camera industry is now a victim of its own success. Between the two, in planes to Tokyo and Texas, darts Butler, ‘a left-winger with capitalist tendencies’ as he describes himself. He has his own private design philosophy, like anybody else, but he also has both the inclination and the ability to get published. That entails working within the limits of profitability, ‘but again that’s a spur to being creative, not a hindrance’.

Where are Nick Butter and his profession going? We aren’t, he stresses, in the age of the designer as superhero. The press is wrong to suggest that romantically inspired individuals, Renaissance men, are the substance of design. ‘Of course, you need a conductor to get the best out of an orchestra. But without the musicians you’re nothing’.

Butler’s attitude to publicity is of a piece with this. He doesn’t want it. He can, he says, afford not to be in the Financial Times: ‘I know it sounds awful, but we’ve got too much work on at the moment to take on any we might get from appearing there’. And he has no desire to be in the design press - ‘I’d rather be in a trade rag, frankly’. He just wants to satisfy the consumer, and also ‘affect the whole way we live, how we buy things, how we shop’. There’s a need for literary barbs in design, he admits, but he finds the smaller items in Blueprint ‘scurrilous, unconstructive’. He wants yet higher standards at BIB, so that his own design thinking is challenged and beaten more regularly by his colleagues. ‘Oh yes’, he concludes absently, ‘I’d like to slow down’.

Postscript, Easter 2012:

The great graphic designer Mike Dempsey interviewed Nick Butler in 2009 as part of RDInsights, a series of interviews with Royal Designers for Industry, on

http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/mp3/0007/204559/Nick-Butler_edit_Final_2.mp3

7 April 2012 | Design magazine, February 1983

2 April 2012 | Blueprint, November 1984

David King: graphic designer, ranged left

When once he art edited the Sunday Times colour supp, David King brought picture after picture of Leon Trotsky to the breakfast-tables of Britain. Nearly 30 years ago, this is his first ever major interview

You could sum up David King as Trotskyist typographer, but he’d object. Trotsky, he points out, said the term ‘Trotskyism’ was an invention of Stalin. In reality, Leon Davidovitch Bronstein’s politics were just Marxism, Marxism fiercely hostile to what the Kremlin had become. King is equally hostile - ‘it’s obvious why’, he says - but he dislikes labels. He is a great admirer of Trotsky’s ideas and of his life, but he can do without the adjective. Especially given the way Fleet Street tabloids use it.

Nor is he, he adds, a typographer. For an unlikely but now famous Central Institute of Adult Education poster, he invented a special typeface, all spikey bold condensed caps; but though it now adorns Crafts and the jacket of his new book, he has failed, as yet, to give it a name. Likewise, his covers far the first 47 issues of City Limits were often distinguished by their use of pure typography as against photographs or illustrations; but King insists that his work is about visual history and visual politics, not letterform. Between 1905 and 1975 he worked with are director Michael Rand on the Sunday Times Magazine. There he not only did typography, but travelled widely and took a lot of pictures too. Above all, though, he discovered.

King owns photographs that undo, in a single shot, all the re writing of history for which Uncle Joe became notorious. He has not just the one in which the steps up to the podium occupied by Lenin are filled with al expectant but later-to-be-retouched-out Trotsky. No: he has a narrow pose of Lenin in front of Maxim Gorky, and the original from which it was taken - complete with Bukharin, Zinoviev, the German communist leader Karl Radek and the Indian communist M N Roy. All edited out by the GPU. Indeed, so thoroughgoing has been the Stalinist demolition of the photographic form that the false images put together in the 1930s are now themselves almost impossible to find. Khrushchev and his successors made sure of this… in the name of deStalinisation, of course.

It has been King’s achievement to cut through all that. Unshaven, in bumpers and a red chequered Levi’s shirt, full of stutters, exhausted from a game of tennis and with four deadlines to make, he betrays a searing commitment to The Truth. A flat in North London, yes, but ‘I’m not Tariq Ali’. Nor Private Eye‘s Dave Spart: his hesitancy is that of diffidence, not blather, and, though he has no need to impress, Albinoni and Schubert are at the front of his record stack. So why has he bothered to slave away, as he puts it, finding all that archival material? When he began, at least, he cannot have guessed that it would do mare to rehabilitate Stalin’s most eloquent critic than a hundred far left demos. Again: why, apart front what has become known as the David King Collection, is he famous for slotting his photographic finds into a Constructivist graphic format - one that, without his efforts, might never have stirred again since its destruction after 1929?

‘I’m obviously obsessed with Soviet politics, but it all started with the need to disseminate information visually. There’ve been thousands of words written on the Soviet Union - E H Carr alone wrote 13 volumes on the subject. I wanted to visualise the words. In the 1960s everybody used to go on about Modernist design, the Bauhaus. I used to fret that the Bauhaus wasn’t everything. I felt that the revolutionary explosion of graphics that had followed 1917 had been suppressed, both East and West - that it needed to be brought to light.

King doesn’t mention Socialist Realism: one suspects he might choke on the phrase. On the other hand, he bridles at the suggestion that his approach is simply Constructivist. No pigeonholing. Anyway, for all his fondness of reds and blacks and sans serif, the ism is far from accurate. King’s use of montage recalls Heartfield, while Blood and Laughter, the book of anti-Tsarist caricatures he had collected (commentary by Cathy Porter; Cape, 1983), reveals a love of illustration. As to his graphics being derivative, we’ll come to that.

Past accidents

King is 41. It’s hard to believe he has a 20 year old son (doing film) and a 19-year-old daughter (doing theatre). He did painting at school, then trained in typographic design at the London School of Printing, Clerkenwell Green, under the legendary Tom Eckersley and the artist Rolf Brandt. Though he remains critical of Bauhaus worshippers, he’s grateful for hav¬ing the basics of that School drilled into him: ‘Detailing is neglected these days. It’s wrong’. But his strength in typography, like so many aspects of his life, came about by accident. ‘The teachers were brilliant, but the choice of typographic design, not graphics, was made simply because someone told me Eckersley’s department was better. One day I looked up from my drawing board and for an awful moment, considered the possibility that I was only doing typography because I’d wandered into the wrong room’.

Life was very different then. ‘Nothing was designed in those days - you trained in design, then went on to work for a printer. 1 didn’t want to do letterheads. Never. Then a teacher called Keith Cunningham put me on to magazines and Eisenstein, whose ideas at that time few appreciated’. There followed a spell laying out far Illustrated Newspapers, and more than a year with Tom Wolsey, ‘The great - almost the only - art director of the day’. Then, in 1965, Rand recruited him to the Sunday Times Magazine. He was 22.

The move was important. Whereas the London School (now College) of Printing was, King says, ‘all form’, the journalism of the Sunday Times Magazine was ‘all content’. Through it, he did a book on Mohammed Ali. ‘We weren’t full of gardening and cooking like it became after 1975 - all consumery. We did lots of sport, lots of crime, lots of politics’. After five years full time, King decided to work for the Magazine freelance, partly so he could do more books. ‘Books have no ads! I hate ads. They’re like Moscow in reverse’. Yet not only in books, but also in his magazine work, the early 1970s was the period when his name most clearly caught the public eye.

From 1967 on King had slowly started collecting Soviet photographs and building up the network of international contacts upon which he continues to rely for sources. His uncle had been a socialist, he had been a socialist when a student, but it was his presentation of what are still politely known as ‘troublespots’ that made all the difference. He notes how quickly people have forgotten what the Magazine was like then - ‘You should do a feature on those old issues’, he interjects. Bitterly, he dredges up a feature on Biafra shot by Donald McCullin: it ran to no fewer than 23 pages. The captions proclaimed - and, in the phrase of the day, you know it makes sense - that Biafran records of baby deaths officially logged thousands of them as the product of Harold Wilson Syndrome. King’s hatred of the pipe smoking Labour leader burns in him even now. He adds: ‘Today the magazines are all the same. Then, too, they were bigger and less right wing. Layouts only went by a formula because printing schedules were very complex, but then the formulas were exciting. There was a willingness to use young people’.

King laid out McCullin spreads on Biafra, McCullin spreads on Vietnam. He blamed British and American governments for the scenes depicted, and still talks of their ‘hypocrisy’ now. But it was not until 1970 that his involvement with the USSR began in earnest. He went to Moscow for three weeks to do picture research for the Lenin centenary, and, on his return, was given 24 pages over two issues to celebrate it. On his visit, he learnt that Trotsky did not exist in the. Soviet Union. By accident once more, therefore - ‘my interest has never been academic’ - he began 18 months of fresh research, right down to photographs kept in manila envelopes by aged American Trotskyists and by Mexicans who had known the Old Man in the final years before his assassination. The result was a cover story for the Magazine, ‘Trotsky: the Conscience of the Revolution’. Published on 19 September 1971, it ran to 16 colour pages.

In the issue King was given formal credit for his detective work. In terms of mass culture, he had done more even than Trotsky’s distinguished Polish biographer, Isaac Deutscher, to popularise the man who had been leader of the Petrograd Soviet at 26 and commander of the Red Army at 38. The A4 Penguin on Trotsky he brought out with Francis Wyndham that same year sold an astonishing 25,000 copies. A follow-up published in French, with words by Pierre Broué, appeared in 1979, and a new, English-language version is due shortly. But by 1975 King had left the Sunday Timesand established magazine journalism for good. Now he concentrated on political posters, and his graphic technique and philosophy matured.

Hows and whys

Like the Bolsheviks, the left wing organisa¬tions for which King made posters had little money. The designer thus set out to squeeze the last drop of graphic value from his posters. Instead of expensive duo-toning, he would double print, slapping black on red ‘dot for dot’, assuming the two colours would fall out of register, hoping far - and getting - three dimensional effects as a result. Bizarre posters for a United Nations pressure group opposed to trade in nuclear materials with South Africa exemplify his approach. They are the colour of South African blacks and, to stress the nuclear side, come complete with tiny equations reversed out into the big black caps: e = mc2, Apartheid = Racism + Exploitation.

‘All content’ once again. ‘In general writers aren’t visual, photographers are away on a shoot and editors are out to lunch,” says King, “but the problem with designers is that they can’t read’. He insists that they should. At the same time they must know ‘how to be caught in the middle, squashed between editorial, which is always ¬ understandably - late, and printers, who have fixed production slots’. Apart, then, from its money saving aspects, King’s work is distinguished by the speed with which he completes. He never does roughs, only finished artwork: if clients don’t like it, that’s too bad. ‘No time, no time’, he says intently. He uses a setsquare rarely, preferring to buy A1 graph paper, turn it upside down on the front of a light box and compose direct ‘There’s a place to go to on Tottenham Court Road that sells paper with quarter inch squares rather than millimetres. It’s a nice big size’.

King is never paid for his posters. Plenty of rich stars backed the Anti Nazi League, but it didn’t have to part with money - even though King more than anybody else was responsible for identifying (naively equating?) the National Front with Hitler’s bands in the public mind (he used another equation, elided NF = swastika, and inserted the adjective ‘Nazi’ in the slogan ‘Stop the National Front’ with an arrow which was at once carrot, forgetting device and finger of guilt). No pay, no pay, ‘but the best work is always the work you do for free. See what readers make of that when you print it!’.

Well: is his work derivative? ‘Everything’s derivative, so it’s a question of what it’s derivative of. Now, I’m a political designer: I’m interested in design, but only up to a point. (By the way, I’m also interested in art. Most designers are against it, but there’s not much difference between art and design.) In the West, most of those origins are bourgeois - they’re to do with selling magazines, stylishness. I was interested in alternatives. So if my design is derivative the Russian Revolution, that of others is derivative of bourgeois forms’.

King recounts a conversation he recently had with an illustration student at St Martin’s School of Art, where he does some part time teaching. He liked her work; other members of staff didn’t. ‘I told her: if you have critics, ask them what their work’s like, and who they’re working for’. At the same lime he is contemptuous of radical posturing in graphics. He thinks the design of the Labour Party’s New Socialist and the Communist Party’s Marxism Today is lousy. ‘People think that two sheets of Franklin Gothic and some heavy rules is enough to do successful left-wing graphics. It isn’t’.

The present as history

Nearly three years ago, King, the ANL behind him, helped put City Limitson the road to its current circulation of 21,000 (Time Out, the more moderate weekly from which it split, has 66,500 buyers). He lent a hand on the inside of the book, ‘but you can’t lay down a style for others to follow’. His real contribution was in the startling duality of the covers, not just in the type only ones, but also in photographic items: ‘I decided that four colour half tones didn’t show up on newsstands, so I began to turn the four colour press to new ways of handling black and while pictures’. The outcome was negatives of sweaty saxophonists, reversed out as a cyan dot-for-dot overprint on magenta. They looked just like saxophonists look under 2am jazz club spotlights, and certainly stood out when displayed on street corners; but the mark-ups for the printers were, King grins, almost an article in themselves.

At the time he was diversifying. In 1980 he ventured into true 3D work with his design for an Arts Council exhibition on Lubetkin: it travelled round Europe, and confirmed King’s growing interest in wood, sculpture and carpentry (he confides that he makes chairs). Blood and Laughter? ‘Another accident. I was in a Russian emigré bookshop in Queens in New York. It was full of boring anti Soviet books like I Chose Freedom. Then, underneath a pile, I found a stack of 1915 magazines in terrible condition. Some years later exactly the same thing happened again in another New York bookshop. I thought the illustration was much more exciting than, say, Simplicissimus. I like it when pages are yellow and dogged, too. They reproduce better’.

His new book is titled The Great Purges. It has a short introduction by Deutscher’s widow, Tamara, and a history of the Purge as a political phenomenon (typically scholarly, this consists of a series of previously unpublished documentary radio plays broadcast by Isaac Deutscher in the early 1960s (the book is published on 8 November by Basil Blackwell, price £12.50). Purges is, in my view, a triumphant return to form, all cinematic close ups and long shots, words integrated with pictures in a piece of ergonomics many of Britain’s better respected graphic designers could learn a lot from. Already The Stalin Myth, a kind of Purges 2, is on its way.

How, given these gargantuan projects, did King handle a job as different as redesigning the Crafts Council’s Crafts? The answer is as professional and as political as one would expect. ‘The editor, Tina Margetts, gave me a call. I felt the old style was too timid, but I didn’t want it to look like a political magazine. What was obvious was that the crafts needed a more directional and more international feel to them - as an occupation, they’re atomised, and were until recently in a rather bad way. The magazine, too, needed the same feel. They couldn’t afford a dummy, so I went straight out and did a whole issue. Also I represented a change in the means of production for then. Laying out direct, they could move from nine to sixteen pages of four colour, and add sixteen pages of two-colour too’. Since King took over, Margetts observes, the magazine has started to sell out in all sorts of places it never used to. It’s an irony that King’s work ‘pays’ so clearly.

Opposed to Stalinism, ready to work for Crafts, King’s political affiliations remain loose: he is a member of no organisation, admits to ‘bourgeois tendencies’ when comes to selling papers outside factories at 6am, and insists that ‘you don’t have be on the winning side in politics - it’s something that grows’.  Yet he’s still passionate, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, appears proud not to be in the Labour Party, His is also a lonely position - not only politically, but also in terms of his fondness for particular graphic gambits. ‘I’m probably the most hated designer Britain. At least it feels that way sometimes’. Nevertheless, graphic designers without self respect still ring him up to ask whether he would mind if they imitated his work. ‘I don’t get cross’, he says, ‘just sad’.

| Blueprint, late 1986

FHK Henrion: graphics as propaganda in World War II

In the 1940s FHK Henrion did some of the world's most passionate posters; in the 1960s, he helped create the face of post-war Britain. Just four years before his death, I talked to him at his house in Hampstead

’In 1942 and 1943 we were just looking to survive. I went by bike to work 15 hours a day at the Ministry of Information, in the London University site in Malet Street. In the afternoon I’d be picked up by a Packard and go over to the US Office of War Information, Grosvenor Square. There, graphic designers at the rank of colonel put together magazines for the American armed forces.

‘Before D-Day we made anti-German posters. After D-Day they were used in Holland, Belgium and France: the Allies got the German PoWs they took to stick them over the posters the Nazi forces of the Occupation had put up. After D-Day I worked with a team of 15 designers making eight posters a fortnight. Multilingual posters with pictograms. My influences were Otto Neurath, John Heartfield and Herbert Bayer’.

To talk to Henrion is to confront the history of twentieth century graphics. The history is a British one but it begins, as does so often post-war British design, on the continent. Born in Nuremberg, 1914, of a French mother and German father, Henrion moved to Paris in 1933 - the year Hitler came to power. In Paris he trained with Paul Colin, with Cassandre and with Jean Carlu, the three giants of pre-war French graphics. He became Colin’s assistant; but then, in 1936, gave in his notice to join Cassandre. At just that point, one weekend in June, the sit-down strikes waged by the Parisian metalworkers against France’s first few days of Socialist government created, Henrion says, a situation of ‘civil war’. He had left Colin but could not join Cassandre.

So Henrion left France for the Levant, where he designed posters for the French pavilion at the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv. Immediately he met more civil war - this time between Arab and Jew in the British mandate of Palestine. Henrion had to get out again: but his work was spotted by the Crown Agents, and, still in 1936, they brought him to us in Britain to design posters boasting the merits of citrus fruit.

In London Henrion took a flat with Walter Landor. He worked with MARS, the Modern Architectural Research Group, picked up some typography as he went along, and was almost outraged to discover that you could get £100 for a bit of type, provided only that it was applied to packaging.

Henrion’s first love, however, remained posters. They were ‘the most glamorous, most artistic’ medium to work in as a designer. ‘You could sign a poster’.

Politics and caricatures

Henrion became a member of Artists’ International, an anti-fascist association of designers sympathetic to the Communist Party. Inspired by the caricatures of George Grosz, he rubbed shoulders with James Boswell, James Fitton and James Holland; also, with Misha Black, in those days a committed Marxist. ‘I wasn’t thinking of joining the Communist Party’, Henrion says, matter-of-factly. ‘Politically, I was a late developer’.

When the Second World War began, Henrion found himself interned with Otto Neurath, the brilliant originator of Isotype pictograms. Set free, he worked for the Brits, the Americans, and the Dutch government in exile. Here Henrion did posters that, to my mind, make him one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant wartime graphic designers - the propaganda equal, in many respects, of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky in the turbulent years of 1917-21.

As Heartfield had borrowed montage from Rodchenko, so in turn Henrion borrowed from Heartfield. He hand-coloured photographs and, in his beautiful and surreal ‘It’s a dream - it’s Harella’ ads for the brush-wool coats of the Utility period, mounted these hand-coloured photographs on to engravings. His sensational poster for Mrs Stafford Cripps’ aid-to-Chiang-Kai-Shek fund was based on a montaged photograph of a London Chinese waiter:  ‘The most contrived human models’, he jokes, ‘were always the best’.

To see Henrion’s wartime work is to be conscious of a structure of political alliances very different to that obtaining today. The wife of Cripps, previously a left-wing firebrand, organised money for Chiang-Kai-Shek, who in 1927 had drowned the Chinese revolution in blood and so postponed it more than 30 years. The wife of Churchill, the notorious anti-Bolshevik of the 1920s, organised an Aid to Russia Fund with Henrion’s help: he used as the basis of his montaged poster a summer 1941 issue of Pravda. Henrion’s most striking poster, however, is about international alliances. Against a sunburst yellow background, a black swastika is pulled apart, fragmenting into four sections pulled by hands painted with Stars-and-Stripes, Union Jacks, Tricolours and Hammer-and-Sickles.

Those juxtaposed flags showed even then how much Henrion had appropriated the basic language of what was to become known as ‘corporate identity’ in the 1960s. Unlike quite a number of his contemporaries, Henrion realised in the 1950s that posters had, in the wake of television and press advertising, moved from being a leading promotional medium to a supportive one. He therefore dropped posters and proceeded to ‘work for fewer clients, with more control’, in corporate identity. KLM’s logo was one of his first jobs.  Thereafter, he did some of Britain’s most familiar housestyles: Blue Circle cement, BEA, London Electricity Board, Giro, Wates, Tate & Lyle, and Coopers & Lybrand. Together with a collaborator, Ian Dennis, he also designed the National Theatre logo.

The new face of Britain

More, perhaps, than any other graphic designer, Henrion helped create the face of post-war Britain. His posters for Tony Benn in Labour’s election campaign of 1964 - ‘Fair rents, cheaper mortgages - YES, it’s part of Labour’s plan’ and a ‘More teachers, smaller classes’ with the same punch-line - are redolent of the Wilsonian era.

Henrion’s bookcases are, unlike those of many designers, ample and full. He unfurls automatically a slide projection screen in his home studio. His talk on trompe l’oeil and his essay ‘I Eye, sir’ in the Design Council anthology Royal designers on design are both intriguing; he is an accomplished lecturer at art schools and international design conferences; he has done distinguished exhibitions, sculptures, jewellery and product design; his contemporary posters and design work are still powerful. But somehow it is still that high-pressure early 1940s output - the wartime propaganda posters - that fascinates the Most

Mid-century modern

A difference between then and now is that America was widely celebrated. When, in 1942, Roosevelt entered the war proclaiming that man should be free of want and fear, free to worship and say what he liked. Henrion designed a hugely successful exhibition for Artists International to uphold FDR’s Four Freedoms. Held in an air raid shelter underneath a bombed-out John Lewis, Oxford Street, it featured Sutherlandish ruins spray-painted by artists-turned-firemen. There were 12 paintings by Oskar Kokoschka, Augustus John and others; C Day Lewis captions which made up a rhyming poem, and an opening ceremony performed by Brendan Bracken. But this Atlanticism - like Henrion’s wartime cover for Harpers illustrating Lend Lease with a benevolent American hand dispensing tanks and planes - would probably not find such a sympathetic audience today.

Compared with all too many late twentieth-century designers, however, mid-century Henrion was specially adept at juxtaposing slogans, captions and general copy against images. He read the words and understood them. He was also keen on pictograms. His posters for the Ministry of Agriculture included a succession of hand-coloured photomontages and pictograms urging those digging for victory to get into pigs, allotments and rabbits, which were ‘off the ration’. Pictograms were later the basis of Henrion’s impossibly complex diagram explaining the National Health Service to a sceptical British Medical Association.

There is much to be learnt from Henrion’s work, and there is still a history to be written of him, Penguin’s Hans Schmoller, Czech and Polish graphic designers like Walter Trier and George Him, and of wartime graphics greats such as Fougasse, the Radio Times and The Listener. Today Henrion is worried that Maggie’s likely victory in the General Election, ambivalent about West Germany’s technological superiority over Britain, concerned that posters (he mentions Silk Cut) are ‘too clever’, too television-based: ‘The era of the heroic poster’, he says, ‘is over’. He is ‘not sure’ about Neville Brody and feels that West Coast post-modern graphics is all very well but that it is ‘invites to weddings, to shows - no message‘. Nevertheless Henrion thinks that graphics jobs in print, and art school graduates to do them, can only grow. Standards, he says, are higher than ever - but there is, he argues, not much innovation in evidence.

Henrion is not nostalgic about the past. A Royal Designer for Industry and an Officer of the British Empire, he has come a long way in the 50 years since Leon Blum’s Popular Front government; but his critique of current graphic design is a fair, not a conservative one. He is somebody to be admired, emulated, but not idolised. He represents the progressive mission of twentieth-century graphic design.

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29 December 2011 | Campaign, 16 September 1988

How design got High Streed cred

The British High Street began to swing in the 1960s. By 1988, the frothiest year of the Thatcher decade, it really hurtled

Last month, retail sales in Britain rose by two per cent. Two per cent! The figure doesn’t seem to mark an orgy of consumerism, but it promises to crowd this country’s prisons with more debtors than ever there were in the summer of 1968. Then, the High Street swung - a little, and mainly in London. Now it hurtles, and all over the country too. It took the whole of the Sixties for turnover in Britain’s shops to double. Over the past two decades, however, total retail sales in shops have shot up from less than £15 billion to well over £100 billion. Only in the 20 years gone by have the big chains crushed the corner shop.

Before 1968, ‘multiple’ establishments accounted for less than 40 per cent of retail business in the UK, and showed few signs of concentration. Since that date, they have come to take 70 per cent of shoppers’ money. Like the ‘independents’, their numbers have halved. But the 25,000 who remain are strong, while the nation’s 200,000 family owned stores, last outposts of the brown paper bag, have their doors open to a difficult future.

So folk memory of the 1960s, of one long hippie spending spree, colourful father to today’s boom in retail design, really won’t do.

Before 1968, the average British worker’s weekly wage was but £3. The Sixties were the age of Birmingham’s monstrous Bull Ring and the Elephant and Castle shopping centre; of thriving bingo halls and closed up cinemas; of pubs decked out in velvet and steak houses in deepest red; of mail order paid by installments, and of Green Shield stamps. There is little to connect the era with 1988.

It is true that Burton was around in 1968. Yet the Eighties, not the Sixties, were when Sir Ralph Halpern emerged to segment his markets and develop Top Shop, Top Man, Burton, Principles, Principles for Men, Harvey Nichols, Debenhams and Radius.

Likewise George Davies (Next, Next for Men, Next to Nothing, Next Too, Next Interiors, Next Accessories, Next Directory) is no child of the 1960s, but an 1980s phenomenon.

Even fashion survivors from the 1960s in fact date from earlier times. Michael Barrie, who has taken over Take Six (1966 87), first began trading in 1948. Mary Quant started Bazaar, on the King’s Road, way back in 1955. John Stephen set up on Carnaby Street in 1959. Theirs was a long haul, and one that only began to get easier by the 1970s.

Fashion was as pivotal to the High Street in 1968 as it is in 1988, but its role was quite different. Then, converging with music and with a large generation of youth that had - for the first time since the war - some money in its pockets, a mere 15,000 boutiques gave a few architects and graphic designers a chance to break the stranglehold which shopfitters had over shop environments.

Now, giants such as Burton and Next have not simply created a whole new and populous discipline known as retail design: much more importantly, they have helped develop a sensibility toward design among all age groups, in advertising, and among clients as influential and as varied as ASDA, British Rail, Granada, Midland Bank and Woolworth.

Before 1968, Britain’s uniquely powerful shopfitting industry, almost bereft of designers, decked out names that have vanished - United Drapery Stores (950 outlets), Pricerite (58). There was some work for architects Bronek, Katz and Vaughan and Yorke, Rosenberg and Marshall, and Design Research unit handled Peter Robinson. Otherwise, however, the main design entree was for US consultancies; and while Raymond Loewy’s organisation acquitted itself well with John Lewis, other companies could only offset a frequent relapse into Marie Antoinette aesthetics with unrivalled analysis of merchandise and marketing data.

Today times are not so lean. Some shops change their look every three to five years, not every eight to ten. Britain’s only undergraduate course in retail design, run by Anthony Parsons at London’s College of Distributive Trades, has just finished its first year, and the largest design consultancies boast, belatedly, specialist retail marketing expertise. 

Design budgets, aided by much larger advertising budgets, have helped make retailers some of the best remembered brands Britain. Meanwhile, both UK retailers and UK retail designers have taken the fire back to the US: Sainsbury has acquired Shaw, in New England; Marks and Spencer has purchased Brooks Brothers; Fitch has merged with design consultants Richardson Smith.

Back in Britain, the benefits of post 1981 retailing to the consumer have been tangible. There are more chains, but more choice. There is greater merchandise specialisation, but greater product co ordination too.

For women at work and for Britain’s multiplying motorists, late night shopping and easy to park stores away from city centres are a boon. Some of the dark, gusty, concrete walls of the 1960s at least sport airy glass roofs and more wholesome catering; edge-of-town food superstores radiate hygiene and fresh produce; out-of-town DIY merchants make strenuous efforts to persuade their domestic suppliers to match foreign standards of product quality.

Building upwards in the tighter, comparison shopping urban context, and spreading outwards to provide convenience shopping, are the trends. They are symbolised by the escalator and by trolleys on tarmac, and show how much the High Street has changed since 1968. But the widely hyped decline of retailing in the inner city today is as nothing compared with the demise of neighbourhood shopping then. Indeed, in many ways, the High Street has been buoyed up by newly competitive service providers - banks, building societies and, very recently, utilities.

Above all, the British High Street has improved in terms of interiors. Gone, with the never ending ‘everything must go’ sales of the hyper inflationary 1970s, are the strips and strips of burning fluorescent lights, the acres of washable, scratchproof imitation wood laminates, the yards of groceries in cardboard boxes. Today’s stores, often under new management, persuade one audience with tiny, twinkling low-voltage lamps, another with terrazzo floors, another with jerseys stacked flat in burnished walnut shelves.

With all this modernity, nevertheless, it is fair to mourn the passing of the boutique, just as it is fair to celebrate the continuity of Habitat.

If today’s spatial dynamic in retailing is vertical and lateral, that of 1968 was basically cellular. Just as record shops had sound insulated booths to groove in (where are they now?), so the point of the 1960s boutique was to dive out of open air, High Street, bourgeois consumption into an altogether pokier, more exotic variety. Boutiques were about purple floors, chocolate brown walls and cast a-layer-off changing-rooms: there was an element of secrecy about them.

Architects Campbell, Zogolovitch and Gough did cave like boutiques. The Way In, a cell within Harrods, had deep purple carpets, purple ceilings and walls, and purple cafe stools in GRP. Nigel Waymarth’s Granny Takes a Trip, on the Portobello Road, was, beneath six or seven changes of fascia in the 1960s, a lush, dark world of feather fans and funny frock coats.

Boutiques did go in for bright display, of course. Mr Freedom, designed by Jon Weallans, and the mural on the Apple Shop, Baker Street designed by two 23 year-old Dutchwomen known as The Fool - were brassy enough. Again, the seminal radiused windows and corners of the Chelsea Drugstore, designed by King’s Road kings Garnett Cloughley Blakemore and Associates, oozed a breezy, astronautic sensuality. But the basic motifs in boutiques paralleled the saturnine clubs of the 1960s: the UFO, the Middle Earth, the Marquee and the Arts Lab.

As for Terence Conran’s Fulham Road emporium - founded in 1964 for £1.50 per square foot - it pioneered the whole business of targeting a particular lifestyle. Taking off from British toy shops (Play and Learn, James Galt) and French warehouses, Conran coordinated, piled his kitchen utensils high, and went on to set up next to Heal’s and in Manchester and Brighton too. Only by 1970, though, were his outlets really profitable.

In the 1980s we have lost the subterranean charms of Biba and the open optimism of 1960s petrol stations – the Esso sign means happy motoring, and all that. From the 1960s we have retained self-service, and, with it, the centrality of pack design. Yet, when we document the real past outside London, we miss little from the retailing of 1968. London impressed the media and the tourists; the provinces barely registered.

Take, for example, Leeds. Compare the entries for that city, 1968 vs 1988, in the indispensable Retail Directories published by Newman Books, London. It is evident that, 20 nearby the main High Street, Briggate, there was a plurality of fashion and footwear stores and no fewer than nine jewellers. The boutiques, if they deserved the title, seemed confined to shops named ‘Amber’ and ‘Miss Janet’.

There were five furniture stores, with names daunting (Super Bargain Centre), or all too familiar today (Woodhouse; Cavendish). We may lament the passing of Attrills ironworkers, Coombes shoe repairers, Gigi’s coffee bar, the Ceylon Tea Centre and Kitchens’ musical instruments; but we hardly shed a tear for the demise of two motorbike parts dealers, thc2s bd shop (housewares) and the Locarno Dance Hall.

Today’s Leeds has lost only 10 per cent of its half million population since 1968. It has gained Marks and Spencer, Habitat, Virgin, Zodiac Toys, a lot of fast food places, several computer vendors, a Housing Information Office, a glazier, a baker and a club called Hollywood Days and Hollywood Nights. The mix, no doubt, is not to everybody’s taste. But the typical British High Street of 1988 is a vastly more stimulating place to be than the main drag of yesteryear.