First Things First RevisitedBy Rick Poynor
This article was first published in 1999 in
Emigre 51.
When Ken Garland published his First Things First manifesto
in London thirty-five years ago, he threw down a challenge to
graphic designers and other visual communicators that refuses
to go away. As the century ends, this brief message, dashed off
in the heat of the moment, and signed by twenty-one of his
colleagues, is more urgent than ever; the situation it lamented
incalculably more extreme.
It is no exaggeration to say that designers
are engaged in nothing less than the manufacture of
contemporary reality. Today, we live and breathe design. Few of
the experiences we value at home, at leisure, in the city or
the mall are free of its alchemical touch. We have absorbed
design so deeply into ourselves that we no longer recognize the
myriad ways in which it prompts, cajoles, disturbs, and excites
us. It's completely natural. It's just the way
things are.
We imagine that we engage directly with the
"content" of the magazine, the TV commercial, the
pasta sauce, or perfume, but the content is always mediated by
design and it's design that helps direct how we perceive
it and how it makes us feel. The brand-meisters and marketing
gurus understand this only too well. The product may be little
different in real terms from its rivals. What seduces us is its
"image." This image reaches us first as a visual
entity - shape, color, picture, type. But if it's to
work its effect on us it must become an idea: NIKE! This is the
tremendous power of design.
The original First
Things First was written at a
time when the British economy was booming. People of all
classes were better off than ever before and jobs were easily
had. Consumer goods such as TVs, washing machines, fridges,
record players and cars, which North Americans were the first
to take for granted, were transforming everyday life in the
wealthier European nations - and changing consumer
expectations for ever. Graphic design, too, had emerged from
the austerity of the post-war years, when four-colour printing
was a rarity, and designers could only dream of American
clients' lavish production budgets and visual panache.
Young designers were vigorous and optimistic. They organized
meetings, debates and exhibitions promoting the value of
design. Professional associations were started and many leading
figures, still active today, began their careers.
Ken Garland studied design at the Central
School of Arts and Crafts in London in the early 1950s, and for
six years was art editor of Design magazine, official
mouthpiece of the Council of Industrial Design. In 1962, he set
up his own company, Ken Garland & Associates, and the same
year began a fruitful association (a "do-it-for-love
consultancy," as he once put it) with the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament. He was a committed campaigner against the
bomb, and his "Aldermaston to London Easter 62"
poster, with its huge, marching CND symbol, is a classic piece
of protest graphics from the period. Always outspoken, in
person and in print, he was an active member of the socialist
Labour Party.
Garland penned his historic statement on 29
November 1963, during a crowded meeting of the Society of
Industrial Artists at London's Institute of Contemporary
Arts. At the end he asked the chairman whether he could read it
out. "As I warmed to the task I found I wasn't so
much reading it as declaiming it," he recalled later;
"it had become, we all realized simultaneously, that
totally unfashionable device, a Manifesto." There was
prolonged applause and many people volunteered their signatures
there and then.
Four hundred copies of First Things First were
published in January 1964. Some of the other signatories were
well-established figures. Edward Wright, in his early forties,
and the oldest, taught experimental typography at the Central
School; Anthony Froshaug was also a Central typographer of
great influence. Others were teachers, students, or just
starting out as designers. Several were photographers.
The manifesto received immediate backing
from an unexpected quarter. One of the signatories passed it to
Caroline Wedgwood Benn, wife of the Labour Member of
Parliament, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (now Tony Benn). On 24
January, Benn reprinted the manifesto in its entirety in his
weekly Guardian newspaper column. "The responsibility for
the waste of talent which they have denounced is one we must
all share," he wrote. "The evidence for it is all
around us in the ugliness with which we have to live. It could
so easily be replaced if only we consciously decided as a
community to engage some of the skill which now goes into the
frills of an affluent society."
That evening, as a result of the Guardian article,
Garland was invited on to a BBC TV news program to read out a
section of First Things First and discuss the manifesto. It was subsequently
reprinted in Design, the SIA Journal (which built an issue round it), the Royal
College of Art magazine, Ark, and the yearbook Modern
Publicity 1964/65, where it was also
translated into French and German. This publicity meant that
many people, not just in Britain but abroad, heard about and
read First Things First. Garland has letters in his files from
designers, design teachers and other interested parties as far
afield as Australia, the United States and the Netherlands
requesting copies, affirming support for the manifesto's
message, or inviting him to come and speak about it.
That First
Things First struck a nerve is
clear. It arrived at a moment when design was taking off as a
confident, professionalized activity. The rapid growth of the
affluent consumer society meant there were many opportunities
for talented visual communicators in advertising, promotion and
packaging. The advertising business itself had experienced a
so-called "creative revolution" in New York, and
several influential American exponents of the new ideas-based
graphic design were working for London agencies in the early
1960s. A sense of glamour and excitement surrounded this
well-paid line of work. From the late 1950s onwards, a few
skeptical designers began to ask publicly what this non-stop
tide of froth had to do with the wider needs and problems of
society. To some, it seemed that the awards with which their
colleagues liked to flatter themselves attracted and celebrated
only the shallowest and most ephemeral forms of design. For
Garland and the other concerned signatories of First Things First,
design was in danger of forgetting its responsibility to
struggle for a better life for all.
The critical distinction drawn by the
manifesto was between design as communication (giving people
necessary information) and design as persuasion (trying to get
them to buy things). In the signatories' view, a
disproportionate amount of designers' talents and effort
was being expended on advertising trivial items, from fizzy
water to slimming diets, while more "useful and
lasting" tasks took second place: street signs, books and
periodicals, catalogues, instruction manuals, educational aids,
and so on. The British designer Jock Kinneir (not a signatory)
agreed: "Designers oriented in this direction are
concerned less with persuasion and more with information, less
with income brackets and more with physiology, less with taste
and more with efficiency, less with fashion and more with
amenity. They are concerned in helping people to find their
way, to understand what is required of them, to grasp new
processes and to use instruments and machines more
easily."
Some dismissed the manifesto as naive, but
the signatories were absolutely correct in their assessment of
the way that design was developing. In the years that followed,
similar misgivings were sometimes voiced by other designers,
but most preferred to keep their heads down and concentrate on
questions of form and craft. Lubricated by design, the
juggernaut rolled on. In the gentler, much less invasive
commercial climate of the early 1960s, it was still possible to
imagine that if a few more designers would only move across to
the other side of the vehicle balance would be restored. In its
wording, the manifesto did not acknowledge the extent to which
this might, in reality, be a political issue, and Garland
himself made a point of explaining that the underlying
political and economic system was not being called into
question. "We do not advocate the abolition of high
pressure consumer advertising," he wrote, "this is
not feasible."
But the decision to concentrate one's
efforts as a designer on corporate projects, or advertising, or
any other kind of design, is a political choice. "Design
is not a neutral value-free process," argues the American
design educator Katherine McCoy, who contends that corporate
work of even the most innocuous content is never devoid of
political bias. Today, the imbalance identified by First Things First is
greater than ever. The vast majority of design
projects - and certainly the most lavishly funded and
widely disseminated - address corporate needs, a massive
over-emphasis on the commercial sector of society, which
consumes most of graphic designers' time, skills and
creativity. As McCoy points out, this is a decisive vote for
economic considerations over other potential concerns,
including society's social, educational, cultural,
spiritual, and political needs. In other words, it's a
political statement in support of the status quo.
Design's love affair with form to the
exclusion of almost everything else lies at the heart of the
problem. In the 1990s, advertisers were quick to coopt the
supposedly "radical" graphic and typographic
footwork of some of design's most celebrated and
ludicrously self-regarding stars, and these designers, seeing
an opportunity to reach national and global audiences, were
only too happy to take advertising's dollar. Design
styles lab-tested in youth magazines and obscure music videos
became the stuff of sneaker, soft drink and bank ads.
Advertising and design are closer today than at any point since
the 1960s. For many young designers emerging from design
schools in the 1990s, they now appear to be one and the same.
Obsessed with how cool an ad looks, rather than with what it is
really saying, or the meaning of the context in which it says
it, these designers seriously seem to believe that formal
innovations alone are somehow able to effect progressive change
in the nature and content of the message communicated. Exactly
how, no one ever manages to explain.
Meanwhile, in the sensation-hungry design
press, in the judging of design competitions, in policy
statements from design organizations, in the words of
design's senior figures and spokespeople (on the few
occasions they have a chance to address the public) and even in
large sections of design education, we learn about very little
these days other than the commercial uses of design. It's
rare to hear any strong point of view expressed, by most of
these sources, beyond the unremarkable news that design really
can help to make your business more competitive. When the
possibility is tentatively raised that design might have
broader purposes, potential and meanings, designers who have
grown up in a commercial climate often find this hard to
believe. "We have trained a profession," says
McCoy, "that feels political or social concerns are
either extraneous to our work or inappropriate."
The new signatories' enthusiastic
support for Adbusters' updated First Things
First reasserts
its continuing validity, and provides a much-needed opportunity
to debate these issues before it is too late. What's at
stake in contemporary design, the artist and critic Johanna
Drucker suggests, isn't so much the look or form of
design practice as the life and consciousness of the designer
(and everybody else, for that matter). She argues that the
process of unlocking and exposing the underlying ideological
basis of commercial culture boils down to a simple question
that we need to ask, and keep on asking: "In whose
interest and to what ends? Who gains by this construction of
reality, by this representation of this condition as
'natural'?"
This is the concern of the designer or
visual communicator in at least two senses. First, like all of
us, as a member of society, as a citizen (a word it would be
good to revive), as a punchdrunk viewer on the receiving end of
the barrage of commercial images. Second, as someone whose
sphere of expertise is that of representation, of
two-dimensional appearances, and the construction of
reality's shifting visual surface, interface and
expression. If thinking individuals have a responsibility to
withstand the proliferating technologies of persuasion, then
the designer, as a skilled professional manipulator of those
technologies, carries a double responsibility. Even now, at
this late hour, in a culture of rampant commodification, with
all its blindspots, distortions, pressures, obsessions, and
craziness, it's possible for visual communicators to
discover alternative ways of operating in design.
At root, it's about democracy. The
escalating commercial take-over of everyday life makes
democratic resistance more vital than ever.
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A Selection of Essays from Emigre Magazine
Ambition/Fear
By Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 11.
Neomania
By Anne Burdick. Published in Emigre 24.
Fallout
By Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 30.
An Interview with Steven Heller
By Michael Dooley. Published in Emigre 30.
An Interview with David Shields
By Michael Dooley. Published in Emigre 30.
An Interview with Edward Fella
By Michael Dooley. Published in Emigre 30.
An Interview with Mr. Keedy
By Michael Dooley. Published in Emigre 30.
In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures
Part I
By Andrew Blauvelt. Published in Emigre 32.
Discovery by Design
By Zuzana Licko. Published in Emigre 32.
In and Around: Cultures of Design and the Design of Cultures
Part II
By Andrew Blauvelt. Published in Emigre 33.
An Interview with Rick Poynor
By Mr. Keedy. Published in Emigre 33.
Radical Commodities
By Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 34.
Copping an Attitude
By Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 38.
Graphic Design and the Next Big Thing
By Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 39.
That was then, and this is now: but what is next?
By Lorraine Wild. Published in Emigre 39.
Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era
By Mr. Keedy. Published in Emigre 47.
Skilling Saws and Absorbent Catalogues
By Kenneth FitzGerald. Published in Emigre 48.
First Things First Revisited
By Rick Poynor. Published in Emigre 51.
First Things First Manifesto 2000
Various authors. Published in Emigre 51.
Saving Advertising
By Jelly Helm. Published in Emigre 53.
The Emigre Legacy
By Rudy VanderLans. Published in Emigre 56.
Sustainable Consumerism
By Chris Riley. Published in Emigre 59.
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