Caslon began his career as an apprentice to an engraver of gunlocks and barrels. In 1716 he opened his own engraving shop in London and soon began to make tools for bookbinders and silver chasers. When his work came to the attention of the printer John Watts, Caslon was given the task of cutting type punches for various presses in London. In 1720 he designed an “English Arabic” typeface used in a psalter and a New Testament. Two years later he cut excellent roman, italic, and Hebrew typefaces for the printer William Bowyer; the roman typeface, which was first used in 1726, later came to be called Caslon. The success of Caslon’s new typefaces in England was almost instantaneous, and, as a result, he received loans and sufficient trade to enable him to set up a complete typefoundry. From 1720 to 1780, few books were printed in England that did not use type from his foundry.

Caslon’s first specimen sheet was issued in 1734 and exhibited his roman and italic types in 14 different sizes. His types eventually spread all over Europe and the American colonies, where one of his fonts was used to print the Declaration of Independence. Caslon’s typefaces combined delicate modeling with a typically Anglo-Saxon vigour.

After 1735 Caslon’s eldest son, William (1720–88), joined him and by about 1742 had become a partner. Though the son lacked his father’s great abilities, he maintained the reputation of the firm and, with the aid of his wife, Elizabeth, managed it skillfully. After William’s death in 1788, the original Caslon & Son foundry was divided among his heirs.

In 1998, Justin Howes reestablished the Caslon foundry, under the name H. W. Caslon & Company Limited, with an expanded version of ITC Founder’s Caslon as the company’s initial product. However, following the death of Justin Howes in 2005, the revived H.W. Caslon & Company was no longer in business, and the expanded Founders Caslon is no longer offered in retail market.

William Caslon in Wikipedia

Willam Caslon in Linotype

Florist, Author + Social Reformer (1886-1960)

As a florist, social reformer, teacher and best-selling author, CONSTANCE SPRY (1886-1960) democratised home-making in mid-20th century Britain by teaching millions of people that – with a little imagination – they could beautify their homes with flowers plucked from hedgerows and scraps of wasteland.

Few people have had such a powerful influence over the way we decorate our homes as Constance Spry. First as a teacher and social reformer, then as a society florist and best-selling author, Spry (1886-1960) taught mid-20th century Britons how to beautify their homes with such unassuming materials as berries, vegetable leaves, twigs, ferns and weeds displayed in a motley assortment of containers from gravy boats and bird cages, to tureen lids and baking trays.

In an era when millions of people were decorating their homes to their own taste for the first time, Constance Spry helped them to do so with flair and for very little money. Believing that everyone had the right to beautify their home and that the means of doing so could be found in woods, hedgerows, vegetable patches or scraps of wasteland, Spry popularised her democratising and essentially bohemian style of home-making by dispensing no-nonsense advise in books, articles and radio broadcasts all over the world. “I do feel strongly,” she once wrote, “that flowers should be a means of self-expression for everyone.”

A household name in the UK throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Constance Spry was then regarded as a quaintly anachronistic, if not obscure figure. Yet her influence as a home-maker and social reformer has endured in the do-it-yourself creative spirit of such diverse institutions as art schools and the Women’s Institute.

Born in Derby in 1886, Constance was the eldest child and only daughter of George Fletcher, an ambitious railway clerk, and his wife Henrietta Maria. George studied hard to become a civil servant and the Fletcher family moved to Ireland, where Constance studied hygiene, physiology and district nursing. After lecturing on first aid and home nursing in Ireland, she married James Heppell Marr in 1910 and moved to Coolbawn, near Castlecomer, where she developed a passionate interest in gardening. When World War I began in 1914, Constance became secretary of the Dublin Red Cross. Two years later she left Ireland and her unhappy marriage with her son Anthony to work in welfare in England.

Constance Spry Resources

• Design Museum
• Wikipedia

Product + Furniture Designer (1932-)

One of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative Italian designers of the late 20th century, ENZO MARI (1932-) has proved as influential to younger generations of designers as to his peers as a writer, teacher, artist and designer of products, furniture and puzzle games.

There is a possibly apocryphal story that Enzo Mari once devoted over a year to thinking about – and experimenting with – the design of a single ashtray. He worked on other projects at the same time, but the ashtray was always at the forefront of his mind.When finished, it was praised by Mari’s peers as exceptionally elegant and dramatically different from existing ashtrays. Unfortunately it proved too different for the public’s taste. The ashtray flopped and its only enduring legacy was Mari’s “two-packs-a-day” cigarette habit.

Such conundrums have characterised Mari’s career. As a designer he is too esoteric to have attained the commercial success enjoyed by fellow late 20th century Italian designers such as Ettore Sottsass and the late Joe Colombo. Yet the depth and complexity of Mari’s work ensures that he is greatly admired by the design community and, in his seventies, is still sought out as a designer.

Born in Novara, Italy in 1932, he studied classics and literature at the Academia di Brera in Milan from 1952 to 1956. As a student, Mari supported himself by working as a visual artist and freelance researcher. In a period when Italian design was flourishing as enlightened industrialists collaborated closely with designers to rebuild their businesses, he also became interested in design and painstakingly taught himself about it.

Mari’s approach to design was predominantly theoretical. He was more concerned with its role in contemporary culture and relationship with the user than with becoming a design practitioner. After graduating in 1956 he opened a studio in Milan to continue his studies of the psychology of vision, systems of perception and design methodologies. These studies took physical form when Mari created three-dimensional models of linear elements and planes. Forced to earn a living, Mari made contact with the Italian plastic products manufacturer Danese and agreed to develop a series of mass-manufactured products.

His first project for Danese was 16 Animali, or 16 Animals, launched in 1957. It was a wooden puzzle to which Mari applied his theories of problem-solving to create a group of simply carved animal shapes – including a hippo, snake, giraffe and camel – that join together to form a rectangle. The puzzle marked the start of a long collaboration between Mari and Danese, which continued at the turn of the 1960s with the development of containers and vases. Mari was determined to develop these products for mass production without compromising his belief that the outcome of each design project should be beautiful to look at and feel, while performing its function efficiently. Describing his philosophy as one of “rational design”, he defined his work as being “elaborated or constructed in a way that corresponds entirely to the purpose or function”.

Enzo Mari Resources

• Design Museum
• Alessi
• DolceVita
• Kettererkunst

Dressmaker (1928 – 1995)

Legendary dressmaker JEAN ELIZABETH MUIR (1928 – 1995) made clothes that were both radical and classic, breaking the barrier between couture and ready-to-wear. The self-taught Muir made her name in the 1960s, creating a reputation for exquisitely tailored, timeless, feminine clothing. She has been hailed as the greatest dressmaker in the world, in a league with Madame Grès, Chanel and Vionnet.

Muir is ‘a designer’s designer’, admired by the likes of Gaultier, Issey Miyake and Giorgio Armani. She received countless awards in Europe, the UK, the US and Asia. She continually held the attention and respect of fashion critics, and worked with some of the world’s most established photographers. A 1975 survey reported the two most copied designers in the world to be Jean Muir and Yves Saint Laurent.

Jean Muir Resources

• Wikipedia
• Jean Muir Site
• Design Museum
• Fashion Windows

Product + Furniture Designers (1981-1985)

MEMPHIS was a Milan-based collective of young furniture and product designers led by the veteran Ettore Sottsass. After its 1981 debut, Memphis dominated the early 1980s design scene with its post-modernist style.

Jasper Morrison remembers breaking into “a kind of cold sweat” and a “feeling of shock and panic” when he stumbled into the opening of a design exhibition at the Arc ’74 showroom in Milan on 18 September 1981. “It was the weirdest feeling,” he recalled years later, “you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, or I was, but also immediately freed by the sort of total rule-breaking.”

The rule-breaking had begun in December 1980 when Ettore Sottsass, one of Italy’s architectural grandees, met with a group of younger architects in his apartment on Milan’s Via San Galdino. He was in his 60s and his collaborators – Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanini – were in their 20s. With them was the writer, Barbara Radice. They were there to discuss Sottsass’ plans to produce a line of furniture with an old friend, Renzo Brugola, owner of a carpentry workshop.

Originally dubbed The New Design, the project was rechristened Memphis after the Bob Dylan lyric “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)” stuck repeatedly at “Memphis Blues Again” on Sottsass’ record player. “Sottsass said: ‘Okay, let’s call it Memphis,” wrote Radice, “and everyone thought it was a great name: Blues, Tennessee, rock’n’roll, American suburbs, and then Egypt, the Pharoahs’ capital, the holy city of the god, Ptah.”

By February, the group, bolstered by the addition of George Sowden and Nathalie du Pasquier, had completed over a hundred drawings of furniture, lamps and ceramics. There was no set formula. “No-one mentioned forms, colours, styles, decorations,” observed Radice. That was the point. After decades of modernist doctrine, Sottsass and his collaborators longed to be liberated from the tyranny of smart, but soulless ‘good taste’ in design.

Their solution was to continue the experiments with uncoventional materials, historic forms, kitsch motifs and gaudy colours begun by Studio Alchymia, the radical late 1970s Italian design group to which Sottsass and De Lucchi had belonged. When the young Jasper Morrison and a couple of thousand others crowded into Arc ’74 on 18 September 1981 they discovered furniture made from the flashily coloured plastic laminates emblazoned with kitsch geometric and leopard-skin patterns usually found in 1950s comic books or cheap cafés.

Other pieces of furniture and lights were made from industrial materials – printed glass, celluloids, fireflake finishes, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals – jazzed up with flamboyant colours and patterns, spangles and glitter. By glorying in the cheesiness of consumer culture, Memphis was “quoting from suburbia,” as Sottsass put it. “Memphis is not new, Memphis is everywhere.” Matteo Thun described Memphis as “a mental gymnasium”.

Sottsass’ 1981 Beverly cabinet sported green and yellow ‘snakeskin’ laminate doors with brown ‘tortoiseshell’ book shelves at a topsy turvy angle and a bright red bulb in the light. Sowden’s 1981 Oberoi armchairs combined tomato red upholstery with bright yellow or blue legs and Nathalie du Pasquier’s pink and black mosaic print in a chubby 1950s style. Martine Bedin’s 1981 Superlamp ressembled an illuminated dachsund with multi-coloured bulbs framing a richly-coloured fibreglass arc. Team Memphis posed for a group portrait lounging in Tawaraya, a boxing ring-cum-playpen with a monochrome striped base, pastel-coloured ‘ropes’ and a white light bulb at each corner designed by a Japanese collaborator, Masanori Umeda. The finishing touch was the invitation to the exhibition opening: a postcard image of a yawning dinosaur painted against a lightning-scarred sky by Luciano Paccagnella.

It was an exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which colour and decoration had been been taboo. Memphis also scoffed at the notion that ‘good’ design had to last. “It is no coincidence that the people who work for Memphis don’t pursue a metaphysic aesthetic idea or an absolute of any kind, much less eternity,” observed Sottsass. “Today everything one does is consumed. It is dedicated to life, not to eternity.”

Little about Memphis was truly innovative. Most of its concepts had been trail-blazed by Alchymia. Yet the Memphis collaborators were much more adept at communicating their ideas and at manipulating Ettore Sottsass’ contacts. He even persuaded Artemide, the Italian lighting manufacturer, to work with them.

Within the design world, Memphis was a watershed. “You were either for it, or against it. “All the boring old designers hated it. The rest of us loved it,” recalled Bill Moggridge, co-founder of the IDEO industrial design group. Among the old guard was Vico Magistretti. “This furniture offers no possibility of development whatsoever,” he declaimed. “It is only a variant of fashion.”

Memphis was seen as equally sensational outside the closed confines of the design community. The packed opening party, cool graphics and hip young designers – male and female, from different countries – proved irresistible to the mass media. Perfectly in tune with an era when pop culture was dominated by the post-punk flamboyance of early 1980s new romanticism, Memphis was also a colourful, clearly defined manifestation of the often obscure post-modernist theories then so influential in art and architecture.

Fashion designer, Karl Lagerfeld, furnished his Monte Carlo apartment with Memphis. The US architect, Michael Graves, joined the collective: as did Javier Mariscal from Spain, Arata Isozaki and Shiro Kurumata from Japan. Memphis was splashed across magazines worldwide. There were exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and back in Milan. But Sottsass became increasingly disillusioned with Memphis and the media circus around it, in 1985 he announced that he was leaving the collective.

Like Miles Davis, who resolutely refused to replay old music, throughout his long career, Sottsass always insisted on moving forward rather than reliving past glories. For him, quitting Memphis at the height of its fame was the only logical course of action. “Acclaimed as a symbol and persecuted like a rock star, far from feeling satisfaction or pleasure, he (Sottsass) sank into one of the worst crises of his life,” wrote Barbara Radice a few years later.

Having broken free from Memphis, Sottsass concentrated his energies on his own architectural practise, Sottsass Associati, where he continued to work with many of his young collaborators, including Branzi, Cibic and De Lucchi. “I am a designer and I want to design things,” Sottsass had written a few years before founding Memphis. “What else would I do? Go fishing?”

THOMAS HEATHERWICK

Designer (1970 -)

One-part architecture, another-part product design, with an equal dash of sculpture and urban planning, Thomas Heatherwick’s body of work defies definition. The London-based designer has completed nearly 200 projects since establishing his studio in the mid-nineties, and with each new commission, merges engineering and design to give his projects a magical, transformative feel. Recalling the great engineers of the industrial age, projects such as Rolling Bridge in central London and Manchester’s gravity-defying sculpture B of the Bang have an experimental quality that pushes the boundaries of technical convention.

Heatherwick was born in London in 1970. His mother – a collector and dealer in beads – influenced his aesthetic development while his father introduced him to architecture and design. Early influences included visits to Earls Court tosee the latest carbon-fibre cars and to the House of the Future in Milton Keynes (ironically, the adult Heatherwick would later consult on the Milton Keynes Master plan).

Heatherwick completed his first degree in 3D design at Manchester Polytechnic and for his final project in 1991, designed and constructed the Pavilion which was later purchased for the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s park at Goodwood. More than fifteen years on, the “temporary” building is still in use. A year later he enrolled at the Royal College of Art where he worked with the engineer Ron Packman, now an Associate Director at Heatherwick’s studio.

Heatherwick also had the foresight and confidence to seek patronage for his concepts.

During his time at the RCA he met Sir Terence Conran and the two developed a close relationship. During the summer of 1994 Heatherwick lived and worked at Conran’s home, building the five metre high laminated birch Gazebo which still stands in Conran’s garden.

Upon graduating from the RCA, the designer founded Heatherwick Studio with the intention of experimenting with architecture, engineering, design and sculpture. His early projects included private furniture commissions and an installation for the Conran Shop. He came to the attention of national and international press with an installation for Harvey Nichols department store windows during 1997 London Fashion Week. The dramatically-lit plywood sculpture wove in and out of the windows and climbed 10 metres up the front of the building. Despite the brevity of its lifespan, the project was explosively popular and Heatherwick’s reputation was made.

Heatherwick and his studio endlessly ponder ‘what-ifs’ and ‘do-you-think-we-coulds?’ The Glass Bridge for a current Kings Cross redevelopment illustrates Heatherwick’s entrepreneurial style of thinking. Before there was even a client or site, he was thinking about how to make an all-glass bridge without adhesives or screws. The solution is sheets of glass held together by compression; specifically, 1200 sandwiched panels under 800 tonnes of pressure. In his Kings Cross studio, he animatedly demonstrates the concept by picking up and turning a stack of books under the pressure exerted by his arms. Similarly, the Vents near St Paul’s Cathedral, a pair of cooling towers, each the height of a three storey building, were was inspired by the simple folding of a sheet of A4 paper.

Heatherwick’s smallest project to date was a collaboration with fashion house Longchamp was initiated by Heatherwick’s musing on the possibilities of zips, which he knew to be available in 200 centimetre lengths. “I was wondering if something could be made of nothing but zip,” Heatherwick explains, initially thinking of a dress. “So we started experimenting with spirals. As you unzip the spiral, the whole object vanishes.” The ‘Zip Bag’ became Longchamp’s first collaboration with an independent designer and led to Heatherwick’s design of the Longchamp flagship in New York.

The brief for the new Longchamp store, to occupy a heritage building in Soho, presented the challenge of a second storey location with minimal ground-floor street frontage. Typically, Heatherwick’s studio embraced the constraints to create a sweeping, sculptural staircase that looks more like a landscape than functional means of access. Made from 50 tonnes of steel, the orange ‘ribbons’ climb the walls and guide the eye and the shopper upstairs.

The recently-completed East Beach Café for the British south-coast town of Littlehampton also takes inspiration from a difficult brief. Heatherwick’s futuristic, shell-like structure integrates heavy-duty roller, weatherproof shutters to protect the building from sea-side exposure.

Not all the projects are high profile and Heatherwick believes above all in diversity of work for the studio. “Because I’m most interested in the gaps between conventional disciplines, the thing I enjoy most is when a new genre offers an opportunity to really define something.”

Heatherwick finds pleasure in what other designers might perceive as unconventional commissions, like the entrance and carpark for Guys Hospital, near London Bridge. He responded with an organic woven façade, created from stainless steel braid that requires little maintenance and creates a new system for routing traffic. In this context, what Heatherwick cites as his dream design job is unsurprising: a large-scale car park for the 1970s new town, Milton Keynes. “It’s is a weird place but I find it exciting because its infrastructure is taken so seriously,” Heatherwick explains, “It needs multistory car parks. But what world-class example of a well designed car park can you think of? There’s not much competition and they’re a very cheap building typology so you could build the best car park in the world for a fraction of the cost of the fanciest new art gallery… I’d like to work on the world’s best car park.”

Biography

1970 Born in London

1984 Attends Rudolph Steiner school

1989 – 1991 Attends Manchester Polytechnic studying 3D design

1991 Designs the ‘Pavilion’ which is later purchased by Goodwood, the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s outdoor sculpture park

1992 Attends the RCA

1992 Designs and builds the Gazebo at Sir Terence Conran’s home

1994 Establishes Heatherwick Studio initially as Thomas Heatherwick Studio

1996 Makes his first Christmas card designed with Royal Mail stamps

1997 Designs Autumn Intrusion a window installation for Harvey Nichols’s window installation and wins D&AD gold

2001- 2004 Consults on the role of public art in Central Milton Keynes, proposing that artistic commissions should extend to the city’s car parks and buses

2002 Completes the Sitooterie – a summerhouse at Barnard’s Farm, Essex

2004 The Conran Foundation Collection opens at the Design Museum

2004 The Zip Bag is launched for Longchamp and becomes the company’s best selling item

2005 Completes B of the Bang in Manchester, the UK’s tallest sculpture

2005 The Rolling Bridge is opened at London’s Paddington Basin

2005 Bleigiessen is opened at the Wellcome Trust – a 30-metre structure made from 150 000 glass spheres and nearly 1 million metres of wire

2006 Commissioned to redesign a million square foot shopping mall in Hong Kong

2006 BBC Imagine Programme features Heatherwick’s work and career

2006 Designs ‘La Maison Unique’, Longchamp’s world flagship store in New York City

2006 Wins the Prince Philip Designers Prize

2006 Twins born to Heatherwick and partner Maisie Rowe

2007 East Beach Café in Littlehampton opens

2007 ‘Boiler Suit’ a façade for Guys Hospital is completed

2007 Heatherwick Studio wins the competition to design the British Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo 2010

2008 Construction begins on 16 creative business units for Aberystwyth Arts Centre

2008 Chosen as part of the team to work and deliver a £80 million retail-led masterplan in Leeds city centre

2008 ‘Piggyback Table’ a table produced with Magis launches at the Salone del Mobile in Milan and is exhibited at the Design Museum

2009 Exhibiting in Design Museum and Beefeater 24 present Super Contemporary, Design Museum 3 June – 4 October 2009

Graphic Designer (1962-)

STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed.

When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result. Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned.

Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas.

Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof.

At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – “just about everybody was better at drawing than I was” – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt. Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics.

In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work. When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills. And when a friend from Austria came to visit, having voiced concern that New York women would ignore him, Sagmeister postered the walls of his neighbourhood with a picture of his friend under the words “Dear Girls! Please be nice to Reini”.

After three years in the US, Sagmeister returned to Austria for compulsory military service. As a conscientious objector, he was allowed to do community work in a refugee centre outside Vienna. He stayed in Austria working as a graphic designer before moving to Hong Kong in 1991 to join the advertising agency, Leo Burnett. “They asked if I would be interested in being a typographer, ” he later told the author, Peter Hall. “So I made up a high number and said I would do it for that.” When the agency was invited to design a poster for the 1992 4As advertising awards ceremony, Sagmeister depicted a traditional Cantonese image featuring four bare male bottoms. Some ad agencies boycotted the awards in protest and the Hong Kong newspapers received numerous letters of complaint. Sagmeister’s favourite said: “Who’s the asshole who designed this poster?” By spring 1993, he had tired of Hong Kong. Sagmeister spent a couple of months working from a Sri Lankan beach hut before going back to New York.

As a Pratt Institute student, his dream had been to work at M&Co, the late Tibor Kalman’s graphics studio. Sagmeister bombarded Kalman with calls and finally persuaded him to sponsor his green card application. Four years later on his return from Hong Kong, the green card came through. His first project for M&Co was an invitation for a Gay and Lesbian Taskforce Gala for which he designed a prettily packaged box of fresh fruit. Cue a logistical nightmare as M&Co’s staff struggled to stop the fruit rotting in the heat of a sweltering New York summer. A few months later, Tibor Kalman announced that he was closing the studio to move to Rome, and Sagmeister set up on his own.

His goal was to design music graphics, but only for music he liked. To have the freedom to do so, Sagmeister decided to follow Kalman’s advice by keeping his company small with a team of three: himself, a designer (since 1996, the Icelander, Hjalti Karlsson) and an intern. Sagmeister Inc’s first project was its own business card, which came in an acrylic slipcase. When the card is inside the case, all you see is an S in a circle. Once outside, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.

As none of the record labels he approached seemed interested in his work, Sagmeister seized the chance to design a CD cover for a friend’s album, H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Many of his contemporaries felt that music graphics had become less interesting once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had shrunk to the dimensions of a CD, but Sagmeister saw the CD as a toy with which he could tantalise consumers. Having spotted a schoolgirl on the subway reading a maths text book through a red plastic filter, he placed his CD cover inside a red-tinted plastic case. Replicating the optical illusion of his business card, the complete packaging shows a close-up of a placid man’s face, but once the CD cover is slipped out from the red plastic, the man’s face appears furious in shades of red, white and green. Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister the first of his four Grammy nominations.

Invited by Lou Reed to design his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister inserted an indigo portrait of Reed in an indigo-tinted plastic CD case. When the paler coloured cover is removed, Reed literally emerges from the twilight. The following year, Sagmeister depicted David Byrne as a plastic GI Joe-style doll on the cover of Feelings. One of his trickiest assignments was for the Rollings Stones’ 1997 Bridges to Babylon album and tour. Sagmeister struggled to persuade the band’s management to accept his motif of a lion inspired by an Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum. Also the astrological sign of the Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger (a Leo), the lion doubled as an easily reproducible motif for tour merchandise.

As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit.

In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the “bad stuff” was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. “Don’t take on any more bad jobs,” Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. “I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good.”

Biography

1962 Born in Bregenz, Austria. His parents own a fashion retailing business. Educated at a local engineering school, then at a college in nearby Dornbirn.
1981 Moves to Vienna. Accepted on his second attempt to study graphic design at the Vienna University of Applied Arts.
1984 Having designed posters for Vienna’s Schauspielhaus theatre with the Gruppe Gut collective, creates the posters for a successful campaign to save the Ronacher music hall from demolition.
1985 Graduates with a first class degree and a $1,000 prize from the City of Vienna.
1987 Arrives in New York with a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute.
1990 Returns to Vienna for community service as an alternative to military conscription. Works in a refugee centre. Posters for Nickelsdorf jazz festival.
1991 Moves to Hong Kong and lands a job with ad agency, Leo Burnett.
1992 Controversy over Sagmeister’s bum-bearing 4As awards poster.
1993 Returns to New York (via Sri Lanka) to work for Tibor Kalman at M&Co. Six months later, Kalman closes M&Co and Sagmeister opens his own studio.
1994 Creates identity for his brother, Martin’s jeans stores, Blue. Nominated for a Grammy Award for the cover for H. P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness.
1995 Starts collaboration with David Byrne by designing the cover of his Afropea compilation album.
1996 First project with Lou Reed: Set the Twilight Reeling album cover. Emblazons a pair of tongues on poster for AIGA’s Fresh Dialogue talks
1997 Creates Headless Chicken poster for AIGA biennial conference in New Orleans and designs graphics for David Byrne’s Feelings and Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon.
1999 Sagmeister carves the text of a poster for an AIGA lecture at Cranbrook near Detroit into his own torso.
2000 Takes a year off to work on experimental projects.
2001 Reopens studio and publishes the book, Sagmeister: Made You Look.
2003 Designs Once in a Lifetime boxed set for Talking Heads.
2004 Visiting professor in Berlin and unveils Trying to look good limits my life, series of typographic billboards.

Product + Furniture Designer (1959-)

JASPER MORRISON is one of today’s most influential industrial designers. Born in London, he is renowned for his ascetically elegant, quietly humorous style and has designed everything from a tray-table to a tram system.

Anyone who wants to understand Jasper Morrison’s work should flick through A World Without Words, the collection of images he compiled in 1988 from his collection of second-hand books and postcards. From one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses and Gerald Summers’ one piece plywood chair to a fisherman’s hut on Hastings’ shingly beach, each image illustrates the wit and elegance with which Morrison has revitalised rationalist design.

Born in London in 1959, Morrison grew up there and in New York, when his advertising executive father was posted in the US. He studied design at Kingston Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. In 1986, a year after graduating from the RCA, Morrison opened his Office for Design in London.

He cites his early inspirations as his grandfather’s study – a light, bright room furnished in the modernist style and an Eileen Gray exhibition he saw at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. During his student years, Morrison became interested in the work of modernist pioneers – such as Buckminster Fuller, Gerald Summers, Jean Prouvé and Le Corbusier – that he discovered in the second-hand books he bought and sold to raise extra cash and later turned into A World Without Words. Another inspiration was the flamboyant furniture he saw at the Memphis movement’s first exhibition in Milan in 1981. Morrison later described the experience as: “Just fantastic. Here was proof that none of the old design rules mattered any more.”

Even as an impecunious young designer, Jasper Morrison was determined to design for industrial production. Rather than making pieces by hand as many young designers do, he scoured London on his Honda 90 moped looking for small industrial workshops which would make up small quantities of objects from ready-made industrial components. His 1984 Flower Pot Table, for instance, was made from a glass circle supported by a stack of ordinary flower pots.

“It was the Thatcher era and those small workshops were being forced further and further away from central London,” said Morrison. “When I started it was a manageable circuit, but as time went by I felt doomed to ride round in ever-increasing circles as they moved out to the suburbs.”

Slowly he won industrial commissions from SCP in London; FSB, the German door handle maker; Cappellini, the Italian furniture manufacturer; and Vitra, the Swiss furniture company whose chairman, Rolf Fehlbaum, contacted Morrison after seeing a slide presentation of A World Without Words.

In 1988, Morrison designed a room set for the Berlin Design Werkstadt exhibition. Entitled Some New Items For The House, it consisted of chairs, tables, a chaise longue, four walls and a door – all made from plywood. At first glance, the objects looked banal with their simple lines and familiar forms, but closer inspection revealed the quiet intelligence with which Morrison had refined them. The critic, Charles Arthur Boyer, later described Some New Items as aving “crystallised” his design ethos: “to produce everyday objects for everyone’s use, make things lighter not heavier, softer not harder, inclusive rather than exclusive, generate energy light and space”.

Jasper Morrison has pursued those goals ever since. Still working for Vitra and Cappellini, he has now nurtured a strong rapport with other clients including Flos, the Italian lighting company; Magis, the Italian plastic manufacturer; Rosenthal, the German porcelain producer; and Alessi, the Italian metal maker. The perfectly plain 1998 Tin Family steel kitchen tins he produced for Alessi and 1997 Moon tableware for Rosenthal echo the apparent simplicity and underlying subtlety of his New Items and the “archetypal objects” that Morrison searches for constantly. “If I watch a film, I often spend more time looking at the details of objects in the background than keeping up with the plot,” he admitted.

Always keen to collaborate with fellow designers – such as James Irvine, a friend from the Royal College of Art, and Andreas Brandolini, with whom he formed the Utilism collective in the mid-1980s, Morrison has commissioned products from them and other designers. He and Irvine worked together to compile Cappellini’s 1992 Progetto Oggetto range of household objects.

Critically, Morrison’s clients have also allowed him to experiment with new materials and technologies. The results include his 1999 Low Pad Chair for Cappellini, which was inspired by one of Morrison’s favourite mid-20th century chairs – the Danish designer, Poul Kjaerholm’s 1956 steel and leather Chair, but used a new method of condensed upholstery to create a comfortable, but durable padded leather seat. Another technical coup is his 1999 Air Chair, an elegant, relatively inexpensive moulded dining chair made from a single piece of plastic using Magis’s new gas injection technology.

Morrison has tackled more complex commissions: notably by designing a tram system for the city of Hanover in what he described as “an exhausting, but not unenjoyable” two year project. He also collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects of London’s Tate Modern museum, to furnish its public spaces with his Low Pad Chairs and 1998 Op-lá tray table for Alessi.

In 2000, Jasper Morrison departed from his self-imposed rule of concentrating on industrial production by accepting a commission from a museum in the Provençal village of Vallauris to produce a limited edition of ceramics made by local artisans. The result, as Morrison himself admits, shares the sleekness and formal clarity of his industrial designs. Rather than being flattered by his interest, the European craft community was outraged. “Why work with the ancient skills of the Vallauris potters,” railed an editorial in one craft magazine, “to make something that looks as if it came from a factory?”

In the early 2000s Morrison set up a new studio in Paris and proceeded to divide his working life between there and London. He acquired new clients such as Rowenta, the French household appliances manufacturer for which he is developing a new range of kitchen products including kettles, irons and coffee machines. Morrison also sustained his relationship with established clients by designing new projects for Cappellini, Magis and Vitra.

BIOGRAPHY

1959 Born in London.

1979 Studies furniture design at Kingston Polytechnic.

1982 After graduating from Kingston, Morrison enrols on the furniture design course at the Royal College of Art in London.

1986 Opens the Office for Design in London to design products and furniture which, initially, he manufactures himself using ready-made industrial materials and small workshops.

1987 Exhibits in the Documenta 8 exhibition at Kassel, Germany. Develops his furniture designs for production by SCP in the UK and Cappellini in Italy, as well as a door handle for FSB in Germany.

1988 Designs a room set entitled Some New Items For The Home to be exhibited in Berlin and presents a collection of images that have inspired him as the slide show, A World Without Words, in Milan. Vitra offers to manufacture the Ply Chair and other pieces from Some New Items For The Home.

1992 Collaborates with James Irvine to develop the Progetto Oggetto collection of home products for Cappellini from designers such as Marc Newson, Konstantin Grcic and Andreas Brandolini.

1994 Completes the design of Bottle, a plastic bottle rack, for Magis which, for many years, will be his best-selling product.

1995 Awarded a DM500m project, then the biggest light rail project in Europe, to design a new tram system for the German city of Hanover.

1997 Designs the Moon collection of porcelain dinnerware for Rosenthal.

1998 Launches the Op-lá Tray Table and Tin Family for Alessi and the Sim stacking chair for Vitra.

1999 Completes the protoype of the Air Chair, a one piece gas injection-moulded plastic chair for Magis, the Globe lights for Flos and densely upholstered Low Pad and Hi-Pad range of chairs for Vitra.

2000 Tate Modern Museum opens in London with public spaces furnished by Morrison.

2002 Lars Müller publishes a monograph of Morrison’s work, Everything But The Walls. Opens a design studio in Paris.

2003 Completes the development of the ATM desk system for Vitra.

2004 Designs kitchen appliances for Rowenta and cutlery for Alessi.

2005 Completes the development of a collection of furniture for the Vitra At Home and develops products for Muji.
Nominated for the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year prize.

2006 Exhibited in Designing Modern Britain 30 July 2006 – 25 February 2007

Designer + Sculptor (1904-1988)

ISAMU NOGUCHI (1904-1988) was an American-Japanese designer who originally trained as a sculptor and brought a sculptural sensibility to everything he created: lighting, furniture, gardens and stage sets.

At a time when it’s commonplace to talk of the blurring of boundaries between cultural disciplines and of designers acting out the roles of artists, artisans and technologists, or vice versa; it’s hard to appreciate quite how radical Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) must have seemed when he combined those roles back in the early 1930s.

If Noguchi had to be described as being any one thing it would have to be as a sculptor. He studied sculpture after dropping out of medical school in late 1920s New York and then in Paris as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi. For the rest of his life, Noguchi applied his sculptural sensibility to everything he created: from his mulberry paper Akari lights and Martha Graham’s dance sets, to the mass-manufactured Zenith Radio Nurse and the stone gardens he landscaped at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and Lever House in New York.

The blurring of boundaries in Isamu Noguchi’s work mirrored his personal history: a fusion of his Japanese father’s Asian heritage and the American modernity of his Californian mother. His parents met after his father, the Japanese poet Yonejiró (Yone, for short) Noguchi, arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1900s at a time when it was fashionable for Japanese intellectuals to live in the US. He placed a newspaper ad for a translator which was answered by a young writer, Leonie Gilmour. She became pregnant but, by the time of the birth, Yone was back in Japan.

Their son, Isamu, was born in Los Angeles in 1904 and lived there with his mother for two years until she took him to join Yone in Tokyo. Once besotted by the West, Yone now loathed it and was far from sanguine at the arrival of his American lover and their illegitimate son. Soon they split up, and Leonie moved from Tokyo to the seaside town of Õmori. At the age of 14, Isamu was sent back to the US to enrol at an international school in Indiana. He graduated from high school as ‘Sam Gilmour’ and won a place to study medicine at Columbia University.

Once at Columbia, he realised that his future lay in sculpture. He dropped out of medical school and renamed himself Isamu Noguchi. Three years later, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Paris, where he assisted Brancusi. After a brief return to New York in 1929, Isamu set off on his travels again to Paris, then Beijing and, finally, Tokyo, for what he hoped would be a happy reunion with Yone.

Fiercely nationalist and still ambivalent about his half-American son, Yone was barely courteous, but he did introduce Isamu to fellow writers and artists. Isamu sought solace in Kyoto, where he became enthralled by the exquisite simplicity of the ancient Buddhist rock gardens. Although he would continue to travel to Japan and eventually married a Japanese woman (the movie star, Yamaguchi Yoshiko) Noguchi lost his illusions about ever being accepted there. Years later he wrote of the Chinese-American artist, Li-Lan, that: “in the same way as I do she belongs to that increasing number of not exactly belonging people”.

Far from being squashed by “not exactly belonging”, Noguchi made the most of it. Back in New York in the mid-1930s, he discovered the social cachet of being a charming, cultured, rather exotic Japanese-American. His sculpture was commissioned by wealthy collectors and in 1935, he began a 30 year collaboration designing stage sets for the choreographer, Martha Graham. He then ventured into industry with the 1937 Zenith Night Nurse, an intercom in the elegant form of a Japanese mask.

When the US joined World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Noguchi campaigned to improve the lot of Japanese-Americans, many of whom were herded into detention camps. After the War, he contributed to the reconstruction of Japanese industry when the city of Gifu asked him to revive its stricken paper lantern industry. Noguchi moved there with Yamaguchi, whom he had met and married in 1950. They lived in a traditional wooden house and he developed new designs which harnessed the ancient skills of the Gifu lantern-makers to produce modern electrified versions of traditional cande-lit lanterns. Beautifully shaped and capable of folding perfectly flat, his Akari light sculptures are still made by hand in Gifu today from the mino-gami paper that comes from the bark of mulberry trees.

Noguchi continued to design new Akari lights throughout the 1950s and 1960s: alongside the popular “organic” furniture he made in curvily sculpted wood for American manufacturers such as Knoll and Herman Miller. He was equally prolific as a landscape architect. After creating a memorial garden to his father at Keiõ University in 1950, Noguchi was invited by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange to design a (sadly unbuilt) memorial to the victims of the atom bomb in Hiroshima Peace Park. Over the next decade, he recreated the ancient Buddhist stone gardens he had loved in Kyoto at Lever House in New York (1951), UNESCO in Paris (1951), the Yale campus (1960) and Jerusalem’s Israel Museum (1960).

Back in New York, Noguchi designed a garden of his own around his home and studio on a disused industrial lot on Long Island City in Queens, which eventually opened to the public in 1985 as the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. He built another home and studio on Shikoku, Japan’s most deserted island. From his two bases, Isamu Noguchi continued to fuse his mixed heritage in life and work until his death in 1988. As the writer, Ian Buruma, once noted this fusion “was not a matter of superficial ressemblances to traditional styles: it was in the spirit of his work: artisanal, utilitarian, and always in search of simplicity.”

Biography

1904 Born in Los Angeles to Leonie Gilmour, a US writer. His father, the Japanese poet, Yonejiró (Yone) Noguchi, has already returned to Tokyo.

1906 Taken to Japan by his mother to join Yone. Over the next 12 years, they live in Tokyo, the seaside towns of Õmori and Chigasaki, then Yokohama.

1918 Sent back to the US to study in Indiana. Four years later, graduates from high school (as Sam Gilmour) and enrols at Columbia University.

1924 Leaves Columbia to concentrate on sculpture as Isamu Noguchi.

1927 Wins a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Paris, where he assists the sculptor, Constantin Brancusi.

1929 Returns to New York where he befriends Richard Buckminster Fuller and Martha Graham.

1930 Two year trip to Paris, Beijing and back to Japan.

1935 First stage design for Martha Graham. Their collaboration continues for 30 years.

1937 Designs first mass-manufactured product, the Zenith Radio Nurse intercom.

1941 After the Pearl Harbour attack, Noguchi campaigns to improve the lot of Japanese-Americans.

1950 Returns to Japan where he designs a memorial garden dedicated to his father at Keiõ University. Back in New York, Noguchi meets his future wife, the Japanese movie star, Yamaguchi Yoshiko.

1951 Invited to Gifu in Japan to create modern design for local paper lantern makers. Back in the US, he designs a garden for Lever House in New York as his first collaboration with Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings Merrill.

1956 Begins work on stone garden for UNESCO in Paris.

1960 Creates gardens at Yale and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

1961 Converts a factory on Long Island City, Queens into a home and studio. He extends the site over the years to create the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.

1968 Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, New York. Publishes his autobiography, A Sculptor’s World. For the next 20 years until his death, Noguchi continues to execute large-scale sculptures and sculptural gardens.

1985 Opening of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum on Long Island City.

1988 Isamu Noguchi dies in New York.

Automotive Designer

As vice-president of design for the Ford Motor Company, J. MAYS is one of the world’s most influential automotive designers. Before joining Ford in 1997, the US-born Mays worked for Audi, BMW and developed the Volkswagen Concept One, which became the new VW Beetle.

One of J. Mays chief criticisms of his fellow automotive designers is that they design to impress their peers rather than the public. In his role as vice-president of design at the Ford Motor Company, Mays is trying to change that by encouraging his global design team network to absorb and express the same influences as designers in other areas: from furniture and fashion to architecture.

As head of design at Ford, Mays is responsible for the design direction of the company’s seven marques: Aston Martin, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo. Since joining Ford in 1997, he has overseen the development of the new Ford Thunderbird and Ford Explorer, as well as such concept cars as the Jaguar F-Type and Volvo Safety Car. Mays also broke with industry tradition by commissioning a designer with no previous automotive experience – Marc Newson – to create a concept car, the Ford 021C.

Born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma in 1954, J. Mays studied automotive design at Art Center in Pasadena, California. After graduating in 1980, he joined Audi in Germany where he made his name with the Audi 80, before moving to BMW in 1983 to work on the 5 and 8 series.

In 1984, Mays returned to Audi where he worked on the the Audi 100, Volkswagen Golf, Volkswagen Polo and the Audi AVUS concept car. He returned to the US in 1989 as chief designer of Volkswagen’s design studio in Simi Valley, California where he developed Volkswagen Concept One, which proved so popular as a concept car that it went into production as the new VW Beetle.

Find out more about J. Mays’ work at ford.com

Q. What came first – your interest in design, or your interest in cars? And how did the two come together?

A. My interest in cars, definitely. Once I realised that people could actually get paid for drawing cars, my interest in design really took off; I headed for Art Center in California and the rest, as they say, is history.

Q. Who and what were the main influences on you as an automotive designer when you were a student and at the start of your career?

A. Giorgietti Giugiaro. Sergio Pininfarina. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Walt Disney. They definitely influenced me as a student.

Q. Early in your career you left the US to work in Europe, how did this influence your development as an automotive designer?

A. Greatly. In Germany, I learned how to construct an automobile: versus how to style one.

Q. Which of the cars you developed as a designer, rather than as a design director, are you most proud of? And why?

A. As a designer, I am most proud of my work on the Audi AVUS concept and the Volkswagen Beetle Concept One – probably because they resonated so greatly with so many people.

Q. Describe your role as vice-president of design at Ford. You are responsible for the design direction of numerous marques developed in studios and manufactured in factories all over the world, how in practical terms can you control or coordinate design strategy on such a scale?

A. As head of design for Ford Motor Company, I’m ultimately responsible for the design direction of all of the products within our eight brands. To be successful, I’ve had to remember that you’re only as good as the people surrounded by. I’ve worked really hard during the past four years to built the best team in the industry, and we’re continuing to strengthen it all the time.

Q. Can you describe your contribution to the development of a particular Ford concept car or production model as an illustration?

A. Let’s take the Ford Mondeo, which is sold in Europe. My role was to lay the foundation for the design of the entire Ford brand, not just to help style a nameplate. Once I established that foundation – or established that DNA – in this case for the Blue Oval in Europe, my job became making sure that it really translated to the Mondeo itself.

Q. Which of the Ford projects you have been involved in so far are you most excited by? And which future projects excite you most?

A. The Thunderbird and StreetKa both have been exciting products. As for a great one further out on the horizon.….let’s just say there’s a Baby Aston Martin on the way that will turn more than a few heads.

Q. You have often been quoted as saying that automotive designers have designed to impress other automotive designers for far too long, why? Is this situation changing? And, if so, why?

A. Designers aren’t easily able to think as customers. And, because they tend to socialise together, dress the same way and have the same black furniture in their living rooms, they tend to have a very isolated – and inaccurate – view of the world. That’s slowly changing, at least at Ford. Because as we start to separate and amplify our brands, it’s becoming clear that each of the brands is a sub-set of the customers themselves. Ultimately, it’s our job to design for those customers, and part of that is better understanding them.

Q. What are the main challenges facing automotive design today?

A. Making automobiles as relevant for the next century as they have been for the past century.

Q. Looking back, which cars from different decades do you most admire?

A. 1950s – Citroen DS. 1960s – Porsche 911. 1970s – Citroen SM. 1980s – Nissan Z. Today – the all-new 2003 Land Rover Range Rover

Q. And which automotive designers or design directors who have played similar roles in other organisations do you most admire?

A. The two groups are largely the same: Giorgietti Giugiaro. Sergio Pininfarina. Hartmut Warkus. Ian Callum. Freeman Thomas. Martin Smith.