Planet Notion - The designers republic

05/09/2007

OK. Pop quiz, hotshot! What do Coca Cola, Swatch watches, mid 90s Indie-pop heavyweights, Pulp, and Sony’s quaint little artificially intelligent robotic dog thing have in common? No, it’s not that each has their heyday firmly in the past, oh cynical reader. Well, OK, I suppose it is that (although Coke can’t really complain at the moment). But the link I’m referring to is that they’ve all been encased in packaging created by Sheffield based design giants, The Designers’ Republic (tDR).

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But designing watches, CD cases, bottles and toys is far from the limit of one of British graphic design’s leading lights. Since Ian Anderson set up the company in 1986 as an alternative to the era’s mainstream design community, they’ve been at its cutting edge. First producing flyers, they’ve since broadened their horizons by designing posters, album sleeves, books, computer games, TV advertisements, various corporate images and were even asked to pitch when Slovenia wanted a redesign of its national flag!

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They’ve drawn influences from everything from early 20th Century Soviet constructivism to Japanese Anime and used creative vehicles as diverse as t-shirts, flyers, video and modern art. Ask which is the enigmatic Anderson’s favourite medium though, and the only response is a cryptic ‘Ideas. It’s all we have of any value.’

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While a quick glance down any of the nation’s high streets shows their work’s inspiration to today’s designers – that famous abuse of the Coca-Cola logo contorted oh so hilariously to read ‘Cocaine’? Thanks to tDR, dance-rock pioneers Pop Will Eat Itself had their initials on a manipulated Pepsi logo way back in the 80s. And yet despite this – and industry specialists rating tDR as one of the UK’s coolest brands last year – to the average (wo)man on the street they’re as little known as to how to detect the sex of an octopus.

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So what is it that’s made them so unique? ‘We aren’t other designers,’ says Anderson bluntly. And it’s this defiant ‘fuck you’ attitude which so encapsulates the brand and its work. For starters, take their refusal to leave their home in the UK’s cutlery capital. You may expect sitting outside of London’s creative hub to be detrimental but Anderson counts it as a definite positive, confidently declaring: ‘We’ve made sure it is.’

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It’s then further emphasised in that even though clients include gargantuan corporations such as Sony, Proctor & Gamble and Powergen, the company has never sold out its ideals in pursuit of the Yankee dollar. Take slogans such as ‘Buy nothing, pay now,’ ‘Customised terror’ and ‘Work, buy, consume, die’ for instance. Or their systematic bastardisation of various company logos; each accompanied by subversive messages. They aren’t just biting the hand that feeds them. They’re taking huge mouthfuls and not stopping until they reach the shoulder. And yet the commissions from multinationals continue to flock in, perhaps realising that a little bit of humility on their part is worth the bottom line results that tDR’s work yields.

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So would a lucrative job ever go against the company’s principles to such an extent they wouldn’t touch it? ‘Yes,’ is the monotone response from Anderson, but with little more information forthcoming, I guess we’ll never know where that dividing line would lie. Perhaps a clue comes from the brand’s ethos, summed up in Anderson’s esoteric statement: ‘Information should be achieved, not given.’