Information graphics are often dry and uninviting. But
Transcription
Information graphics are often dry and uninviting. But
PETER GRUNDY: THE CRAFTSMAN WHO COULDN’T DRAW by JOHN O’REILLY Information graphics are often dry and uninviting. But by adopting an illustrative approach, Peter Grundy – first as one half of design duo Grundy and Northedge, and latterly as Grundini – revolutionised the way information is presented. No more PowerPoint pie charts or dreary graphs. In Grundy’s visionary reworking of statistics, the facts come to life as if animated. 6 Peter Grundy 1/6 3 1 2 7 5 4 8 6 7 Peter Grundy 2/6 INTEGRITY OF THE INFORMATION. 9 For newspaper editors and advertisers, information design is often used as a sweetener – a little bit of sugar that helps us digest the information that we know is really good for us but which we can’t always be bothered with. Yet great information designers take information, data and raw numbers, and hang some humanity on them. Alexander Isley’s info-satire for Spy Magazine in the 1980s; Tibor Kalman’s info-polemics for Colors in the 1990s; and Peter Grundy and Tilly Northedge’s info-iconic work over the past two decades. Tilly Northedge has gone off to pursue passions beyond datacrunching and visualizing, but Peter Grundy is still putting pictures on data. Reading The Guardian on the train to his Brentford work/living space there’s a spread of his recent work for Shell, part of a big 5 campaign that looks like an ongoing re-positioning of the oil company for consumers, and in a sense for Shell 6 themselves, as climate change or not, oil is running out and we need a new energy source quickly. The ads have the Grundy signature of bold shape and colour, driven by an idea that talks to your intelligence and tickles your emotions. It’s easy to forget as you are drawn in by their warmth, engagement and vitality, just how tightly edited these ads are. Great information design leaves no room for messy thinking. It’s why when I go into his studio I take off my shoes, and place them by the row of shoes by the door. Grundy says don’t bother, but it’s more of a nod to the work than the man, that taking off dirty shoes seems tonally correct. But the idea that information designers need to be a little bit anal, obsessively spick and span, is dispelled as Grundy makes coffee and then roots around in a black bin bag on the floor for some milk, apologising that he meant to go out and get some. He assures me it’s fine. It is. ALMOST A CRAFT 10 8 Peter Grundy 3/6 Though Grundy’s work remains utterly contemporary his journey as an illustrator and graphic designer begins in an age when graphic design was viewed differently. ‘I think the nature of design in the late 1970s was different to what students have now,’ says Grundy. ‘I mean the 1980s hadn’t arrived. That was the period when design suddenly became a business, people realised you could make a lot of money from it, it was still, almost a craft.’ Grundy and Northedge had met in the Royal College of Art in 1976, where Grundy was doing graphic design and Northedge was one of the first students on a new information design course run by Herbert Spencer. The course was analytic and research-intense, explains Grundy: ‘once you had acquired enough information for a particular project you would use that to produce some design. Whereas on my course we were down in the V&A doing advertising briefs, they were up in Jay Mews next to the main building in the Royal College, gathering information on shelving systems and then working out the various ways in which a shelving system could be assembled. I think Tilly felt the course didn’t really address creativity, so she kind of looked towards my course. It’s why we got talking because what interested me about her course was that it wasn’t about selling things. I was more into design that was about explaining things.’ ‘Explaining things’ is modest, information designer language for a genre whose cardinal sin is self-expression, ‘show’ and flash. In the world of information design the tradition is that everyone is a Roundhead, the Cavaliers can go to hell. A critic of their work quoted in Graphis magazine would later say, ‘Though trumpeted as “intellectually coherent” their diagrams are cumbersome, wasteful and lacking in logic, economy and accuracy.’ In information design, thou shalt not waste. Yet ‘explaining things’ doesn’t really explain the visual scale of Grundy and Northedge. They invented an iconic language, a style that blurred the boundaries between visual and verbal imagination, and did it in a way that enhances the integrity of the information. ‘The first job we ever did was a cover for Design magazine,’ says Grundy. ‘We produced a book based on a black and white booklet we’d done at the Royal College of our work, because we had done some projects together. There was one project – how to tie a bow-tie, showing various ways in which you could tie one using creative instructions, like back-to-front instructions you stuck on your front, and we sent that out.’ The choice of a bow-tie is inspired because it is an iconic object, because tying one is a skill, and most of all because it is a tactile experience. As much as their work is informative it communicates by being solid, tactile and sensual. Art Director of Design magazine, Keith Ablett saw it and commissioned them to do a diagram for the cover, and they came up with a Thomas the Tank Engine scenario. But their idea of being able to come with the idea and farm out the work to an illustrator hit the buffers of a £160 budget. ‘We thought we’d do the drawings ourselves,’ says Grundy. ‘We both had drawing skills, mine were pictographic because before I went to the Royal College I had been taught to be a Swiss typographer at Bath, and I was quite good at doing those things. But to cut a long story short the whole direction of Grundy and Northedge over the next 25 years, was that the studio developed it’s own visual signature because of budget necessity. We found ways of drawing. If we didn’t know how to do the drawing we invented ways of drawing. We would still have ideas to solve the problem but we would use our drawing, our typography, to make these ideas come alive.’ PHYSICAL, TANGIBLE WORK In LSE Professor Richard Sennett’s work The Craftsman, a sophisticated defence of the economic and aesthetic value of craft that is not anti-machine, Sennett writes, ‘the tactile, the relational, and the incomplete are physical experiences that occur in the act of drawing. Drawing stands for a larger range of experiences, such as the way of writing and rewriting, or of playing music to explore again and again the puzzling qualities of a particular chord.’ Sennett’s account of the physicality of drawing expresses the tangible quality of Grundy and Northedge’s work, something that is remarkably seamless even in the transition to digital design at the beginning of the 1990s with their diagram for Deyan Sudjic at Blueprint magazine. It was a piece on the evolution of London, Grundy calls it ‘illustration journalism’. And they did it on the page and on the computer. 13 11 12 14 Vodafone ad image, Grundini – 2007 VW Save fuel Letterform remastered for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2004 Grundini 3 (page 6) Diagram explaining facts from a typical race meeting, Red Bulletin magazine, Grundini – 2008 4 (page 7) New energy futures, global campaign (ongoing) for JWT, Grundini – 2008 5, 6 (page 7) Poster, diagrams and icons for Shell International’s Scenarios division, Grundy & Northedge – 2004/5 7 (page 7), 9 Everyday things containing chips (Micro processors) Page in AR, Luminous Design/Arm Industries, Grundini – 2008 8 (page 7), 10 G2 Music Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 section, remastered for the Grundini book with originally intended coloured backgrounds, Grundini – 2008 11 Diagram showing what was eaten in the court of Henry VIII for Hampton Court book, Wolf Olins/Royal Parks and Palaces, Grundy & Northedge – 2006 12 Commuter Page divider for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008 13 Money and football Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 Graphic spread, Grundy & Northedge – 2006 14 The arms trade Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 Graphic spread, Grundy & Northedge – 2006 15 G2 Rubbish Diagram for Guardian newspaper’s G2 section, remastered for the Grundini book with originally intended coloured backgrounds, Grundini – 2008 1 (page 7) 2 (page 7) 15 9 alan aldridge 4/6 16 17 ‘IF WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO DO THE DRAWING WE INVENTED WAYS OF DRAWING. WE WOULD STILL HAVE IDEAS TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM BUT WE WOULD USE OUR DRAWING, OUR TYPOGRAPHY, TO MAKE THESE IDEAS COME ALIVE.’ PETER GRUNDY. 10 Peter Grundy 5/6 ‘We did it as a piece of painting and we did it in Adobe Illustrator just to see. We weren’t quite confident it would work so we did both. And the two are exactly the same, funnily enough they printed the painted one in the end, because the printer preferred it – printers hadn’t quite got to the point where they were happy with us sending digital files. For the first 10 years we didn’t have a computer, the images we produced were done by drawing black lines on Kodatrace and then painting underneath and getting the printers to put the two together. We were drawing mechanically before we got Adobe Illustrator and really what Illustrator allows you to do is draw mechanically. It just did in a different way what we were already doing using our hands.’ The computer made life simpler, allowed for easier colour changes, but it didn’t change the style. And some of that style is down to what Richard Sennett might call the ‘incomplete’, the gap in our knowledge which stimulates understanding in the craftsman, which forces the craftsman to think through the activity, enhancing any physical quality. ‘The style was driven by our capabilities,’ notes Grundy. ‘As George Hardie once said when I gave a talk at Brighton, “I’ve known Peter, since college and Peter was always doing things that were based on the fact that he couldn’t draw very well.” In a way I was simplifying things to make it possible for me to be able to draw them. In the end that simplification became the thing that people wanted. They liked the actual simplification, I can’t draw figuratively. Tilly can. Her work is slightly different to mine. When you look at Grundy and Northedge you can‘t tell the two apart but people who know us know that there are differences.’ HOMAGE TO INFORMATION Back in 1996 Hugh Aldersey Williams, the then Editor at Large of Graphis Magazine did a feature on Grundy Northedge and categorized their work into Pictograms, Diagrams and Narratives. Their pictograms, such as those for United Distillers are models of the art of condensation, their diagrams such as the spread for Creative Review on their carbon footprint turns information into knowledge, and 2 their narrative work such as the letterforms for the VW Save Fuel campaign, is a lesson in the aesthetic value of ‘the fresh’ in storytelling. But outside the work, keeping fresh began to become a challenge. By the end of the 1990s Grundy believes that Northedge had begun to lose heart, especially with requests from clients who often didn’t seem interested in creative solutions. Yet ironically, in 2005, they began one of the most ambitious and exhaustive pieces of information design in UK culture. In 13 2005 The Guardian pushed the boat out with its new Berliner redesign, and was looking to make a visual splash in 14 its G2 supplement with some infographics. Guardian Creative Director Mark Porter knew Grundy and Northedge and recommended them to Ian Katz the G2 editor. ‘It was an homage to information’, says Grundy, who retells the story with a kind of wonder that they actually took it on. ‘Ian Katz said, “Can you do them?” and we said, yes. How many do you need? He said, “We are going to do about 25.” And we asked if this was over the period of a year or two years?’ Grundy delivers the punch line with a wry laugh: ‘He told us that we were going to do one every week.’ Given the scale of the task, it was as much logistical as creative. ‘Our job was really to come up with a way of doing them,’ says Grundy. ‘We had two months to come up with a concept because we didn’t know what we were going to do. We worked with Leo Hickman, and his sole job was to work with this and every week on a Monday he would send us a series of 5 or 6 topics, and we would come up with an overall image and that image would be divided into coloured segments which would carry information. So the information he gave us was the actual information that got printed. There was no editing. By the end of the week we would have to send a print ready Illustrator file. They didn’t touch it, it went straight to the printer, who put it in the QuarkXPress document and printed it.’ The turnaround time was intense because it was illustration journalism, not just decorating facts with pictures. Grundy and Northedge did alternate weeks for six months until a new editor arrived and the job ended. ‘We didn’t want to do them to be honest, we’d kind of run out of ideas.’ I suggest to Grundy that they must have been burned-out by the volume of work and the tight deadlines, but in his honest, matter-of-fact manner (no surprise for someone whose work is the matter of facts) he begs to differ, ‘We’d always been used to delivering. Part of the work I do and did, it’s always about delivering. I make sure that what clients get is what they need to get, and at the time they asked for it. We were always quite disciplined about that.’ SQUAREHEADS In 2006, after 26 years of being a designer and illustrator, Northedge left to enjoy and follow her interests outside design. Grundy decided to continue as Grundini, or escape into ‘Grundini’, a fresh name and perspective, though one that goes back to his Royal College days. ‘Instead of answering briefs I’ll create my own briefs, and do things that I will show and sell. I’ll do pictures. One of the things I did before Grundy and Northedge finished was an 18 exhibition at my agent’s gallery Debut Arts, it was an exhibition of heads, and I did a set of posters which were 19 called Squareheads and they were there for sale and that was their only purpose. I enjoyed doing that and with Grundini there will be more of that.’ As he talks me through his Grundini book, a self-promotion piece he is putting together, you realise that post break-up, he is making the most of this opportunity for self-reflection; the self-promotional piece is not just a showcase but a chance to interrogate his own work. ‘I’m planning to do another book. They are signposts for me to work out where I am going.’ He’s doing a lot of work for the 5 Scenarios department at Shell which is a kind of futurology unit: ‘They call them tools to allow people within 6 Shell to think about the future. They are not predictions they are a set of parameters that you can apply to incidents that happen, like 9/11 or the current economic crisis.’ The assignment came to him via the late Alan Fletcher. ‘He felt they needed someone with more informational skills,’ says Grundy. On the way out he points up at a large series of posters by the staircase – The Squareheads. Why squareheads? Then you remember, anyone can draw a roundhead, it takes real craft to draw a squarehead. uu Further reading www.grundini.com www.grundynorthedge.com 18 19 20 Action Aid poster Grundini – 2004 17 Africa Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008 18 Headcase Limited edition Squareheads poster produced for an exhibition at Conningsby Gallery, Grundini – 2003 19 Warhead Limited edition Squareheads poster produced for an exhibition at Conningsby Gallery, Grundini – 2003 20 Utopia Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008 21 Sacred hand Image produced for the Grundini book, Grundini – 2008 16 21 11 peter grundy 6/6