Eye Magazine

CW: Was I, Eye an extension of the postcard collages?

RH: That’s interesting. It had collage elements within it. I’d read that in Latin America people printed poems and sold them on the streets. That was the idea: write, produce and print it yourself. It was sold for a penny. Better Books on Charing Cross Road didn’t like the idea, because if you have something which is cluttering up your space but sells for a penny [laughs], how do you work out your profit?

It was before PMT cameras, and before you could do very much yourself. I printed the photographs, then gave them to a process house to produce screen negatives, which I then assembled, using a glass-topped table with an Anglepoise lamp underneath it. All quite crude. But you weren’t giving instructions any more. You were photographer, writer and all of the pre-print, taking words and images halfway to the state of their being printed. Nobody would have published it, so you were your own publisher.

CW: How did you feel about it appearing in Rick Poynor’s ‘Communicate’ exhibition?

RH: Fine, because Poynor was interested in people who made self-generated graphics, like Fuel and Tomato.

CW: Is there a historical line that continues through you to them?

RH: I don’t think so, really. The intention is similar, but theirs was more ‘graphic’, more related to work they did to earn a living. And there’s a certain preciousness about them.

CW: When did you first become aware of Anthony Froshaug?

RH: Around 1954 – he did very good cards for St George’s Gallery, off Piccadilly. I must have been aware of what was good typography, because I was on the mailing list.

CW: You’d subscribed purely on the grounds of the design?

RH: Yes. In the winter of 1959-60 I visited Constructivist artists in Paris, such as Jean Gorin and Georges Vantongerloo, then went on to Ulm where I met Froshaug. He was legendary, partly because of his work in Herbert Spencer’s Design in Business Printing. I was keen to meet him, although I was more interested in other things going on at Ulm. His work had a poetic, improvised quality before he went there, but as soon as Max Bill criticised him he just ranged everything left and that was that.

CW: You later taught with him at the Central, and you have mentioned before that you had to act as interpreter for him in front of the students.

RH: He’d drop a phrase like ‘Cartesian coordinates’ into a sentence, and I’d have to stand by, saying ‘What he means is …’

CW: It sounds like a double act.

RH: It was! I was still in awe of him. Ultimately I found him repellent, but initially he was very attractive in his passionate concern for every tiny piece of spacing.

A new Bauhaus in Bristol

CW: You taught alongside Froshaug’s friend Norman Potter from 1964.

RH: I’d been working at Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and Potter wrote to me: ‘I think we could start a new Bauhaus in Bristol. You could apply to be head of graphic design and I’ll be head of interior design.’

CW: He was aware that you knew about Modernist design on the continent, and presumably not many others here did at that point?

RH: That’s right. We started these rather radical courses. Potter invented a new category, ‘Construction’. I said, ‘You can’t give a degree in “Construction” – it doesn’t exist.’ He said, ‘Well, I can’t give one in “Interior Design” – that doesn’t exist.’ We did everything our way. We initially used traditional paper sizes instead of A sizes, because they were much more practical and fitted with Le Corbusier’s Modulor system, which then related to seat heights – we’d got it all worked out. We had rather distinguished visitors – Potter had architects like Conran and James Stirling; I brought Froshaug, Wright, Germano Facetti and Paul Schuitema. Potter was a nightmare to work with, but he had very highly developed programmes for teaching. We both used to prepare client questionnaires for each job.

CW: In what way was Potter a nightmare?

RH: He wasn’t practical at all. The way he and his acolytes lived was intellectually austere, but manic. He had a boat on the south coast, and used to take students into the Channel when it was very rough, to test their mettle!

CW: Would a person’s ‘mettle’ in such a situation have any bearing on their graphic ability?

RH: No. I once visited another acolyte, who’d moved into a new flat. One end of his desk was attached to the wall. There was a single leg, fixed to the desk surface with a cross-shaped joint. He said: ‘You see, this part of the cross points out of the window, toward nature. And this points to the fireplace – the other element. This points to the bookshelves, the intellectual life.’ I’ve forgotten where the other one pointed.

CW: I’m sure I could hazard a guess.

RH: This was deadly serious. Potter once directed the installation of an exhibition at the college from the top of a ladder. One tutor, Ken Campbell, shouted: ‘Nobody’s going to see this exhibition from up there.’ Norman looked down: ‘God will.’ He had this idea about the essence of something being more important than how it was actually seen. And if you didn’t hold with what were really just beliefs you were regarded as a trimmer. I’m sure he regarded me that way.

CW: Having set up your new Bauhaus, why did you leave after only two years?

RH: Most art schools then were run by people who came out of the war and got grants for art school, which was an ‘easy’ option. There was always this dead weight of people with whom one had the most astonishing arguments. If they designed a book jacket, they’d then make a mount for it with a bevelled edge, like a watercolour painting. I tried to explain that you didn’t look through a window at it. But this was attacking their values.

A substitute for description

CW: Was Ways of Seeing the first time you integrated images into the text column?

RH: Yes. The influence was Chris Marker’s book Commentaires, which has stills set within the text. I was a fan of Marker’s films, independently of Germano [Facetti stars in Marker’s La Jetée]. As you read you knew exactly what was being talked about. It was a substitute for description: instead of talking about something, you show the objective visual evidence. That’s how I wanted to do Ways of Seeing, rather than have images by the side or text followed by a page of images. Only recently I noticed that this is exactly what John Heartfield did in Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles in 1929, although Ways of Seeing looks more like Marker.

CW: And this relates to the ‘supranational form-language’?

RH: Indirectly. It’s anti-authoritarian: ‘These are the facts; we’re not interpreting them.’ Obviously you can use facts in different ways, so it’s rather naive.

CW: Images are placed next to where they’re discussed – there’s no searching around. Is there never a value in forcing the reader to work a little?

RH: That’s like saying that you should get out and push your car, because then you’d realise the amount of energy expended on making it move.

CW: No, it’s more like getting out and walking for the sake of exercise.

RH: It is an argument. In working to find the answers, the reader might learn something else along the way.

CW: In your integrated approach, only function and syntax take part: things fall where they fall and that’s that.

RH: And so much the better – the designer has plenty of other things to think about. The important thing is to make everything accessible. Unless there’s a serious reason for giving an emphasis to one thing rather than another, I don’t see any point. The trouble is [laughs] you’re making me think quite hard about whether this is true. Something like The Guardian, which is tremendously heavily designed and laid out, might be much better if it was arranged more objectively, with everything the same size.

CW: So you have never wanted to display an image huge because you felt like it, or because it worked but you couldn’t say why?

RH: It wouldn’t interest me – the ideal situation is where you sit with the client and design with them. If anything is emphasised, it’s what they want to emphasise. So often you’re left with no guidance as to what to give prominence to. I much prefer collaborative effort to doing what I want to do. It’s diametrically opposite to being an artist. Artists are free to put things into any form they like, which may or may not be comprehensible in the way they hope. For me, working with the person whose message it is is the most comfortable.

CW: Designers who prefer more space might argue: ‘I’m the expert; why should I let someone who is quite possibly visually illiterate tell me how to do my job?’

RH: It’s more like a consultation with a doctor, who has the knowledge and expertise, and the patient, who explains what the symptoms are, and later says whether the prescribed treatment is working. The client certainly shouldn’t express any expertise in design – they should only express an understanding of what they want to get across. In conversation the designer can sometimes help them understand what they’re saying. It’s a mutual engagement to effect a response from anyone who looks at the material being produced. The more distant from the client you are, the worse it is. This is why client questionnaires are so good: ‘what are you trying to say?’

CW: In some cases, marketing teams are now determining how things should look before the designer is involved. And when the layout is done, the results are taken away and discussed without the designer present. What do you feel about that?

RH: This is where it’s gradually changed. Marketing people have an idée fixe about what they think is marketable, and that’s so often proved to be completely wrong. They don’t understand that other people have expertise. One really needs a long-term relationship with a client before they trust the designer. Competitive tendering is one thing which has destroyed the notion of a long-term relationship: people switch advertising agencies all the time.

CW: I’ve seen cases in in-house departments where marketing staff pull up a chair behind the designer and say: ‘Move that type a little to the left … now let’s see it in green …’

RH: I’d tell them to fuck off.

CW: But where is the borderline here? You advocate design as a social process, but with the current technology the client-designer relationship can devolve into a situation where the designer is merely required to move elements around.

RH: This is true, but it’s partly because designers have taken over many tasks which used to be the printer’s.

Old-fashioned English publishing

CW: You became production director at Faber and Faber in 1976, and this was the only time you were head of a design department. How did you imagine it would work?

RH: It was old-fashioned English publishing design. Berthold Wolpe did a lot of the jackets, but they looked outdated compared with Penguin’s.

CW: So you walked in carrying the torch of Gestalt?

RH: [Mock-gravely] Indeed. The week before starting there, [architect] Jon Corpe designed me a prefabricated office, including wall panelling, and I paid for it. We installed it at the weekend, so when the staff came in on the Monday, they said, ‘The new guy’s arrived – but this wasn’t here …’ I was trying to make the point that ‘now it’s not going to be the same.’

Of course, it didn’t work. There were fourteen of what Faber called ‘book controllers’: would-be designers who went along copying what had been done twenty years earlier. Literally. They copied out old specifications. In Tschichold’s day, Penguin produced the same number of books per year, at much higher quality, with two designers. Something was plainly the matter, as I pointed out. Of course, this was dangerous.

CW: You were there for a matter of months?

RH: Yes, until the day that I was due to become a director. I was asked to talk to them all about offset. I got everyone together, and circulated books I’d designed, to show this new technology. What I didn’t realise was [laughs] the leftist material I was circulating – particularly a book denouncing Lord of the Flies, a Faber bestseller. ‘Christ, if we’ve got this fellow, who’s going to become a director, we’ll be unionised!’ Eventually I had to clear my desk.

CW: And remove it, too, presumably.

RH: No – everything had to be built-in. This was always Potter’s idea. He didn’t believe in furniture. The chairs were the only moveable thing!

Block

CW: The Whitechapel was one of your most significant clients. Why did you choose Block as its typeface?

RH: It came out around the same time as the Whitechapel was built, and somehow Block followed the forms of the building, such as its semi-circular arch. And Block has wobbly edges, and when everything was set photographically, it didn’t matter if it was absolutely sharp. You could blow it up without it looking out of focus. I drew non-lining figures for it. It was enlarged from a tiny reproduction in a book, and was all pasted up letter by letter from a single print.

CW: Block may date from the same period as the gallery, but it’s obviously not of the same culture.

RH: It is in a way. Charles Harrison Townsend, who designed the Whitechapel, was very much of the immediately pre-Art Nouveau school, and I think Block has that character.

I made it a rule that none of the printing ink colours would be pure black. The ‘black’ was often mainly blue or red, tinted warm or cold, not neutral. I got the idea of using red and green to make black from a Milton Glaser poster, Big Nudes. It dawned on me that one could exploit this for halftones as well. We also tried never to print on white paper.

CW: Having decided on such rules for one client, would you then have intentionally avoided them for others?

RH: No, although the printing for other clients was more commercialised. The Whitechapel stuff was printed in Clerkenwell, where I knew the people on the press. I could be there when it was printed and even when they mixed the colour, which made a lot of difference. I could make my duotones exactly as I wanted.

CW: Eventually you were superseded there by Peter Saville. What did you think of his studio’s solution?

RH: The logo, which was specially drawn, became very spidery, yet the gallery is the opposite of that. My idea was to make the name The Whitechapel, because people thought of it like that. Saville dropped the definite article, just as the Tate did later. The newsletter became an A5 stitched booklet, which must have cost infinitely more. Having said this, Mark Francis from the Whitechapel went up to the Fruitmarket Gallery, and Saville did brilliant work for them.

CW: Saville’s logo concept was that, because the outside of the building had been retained and the interior modernised, the same would apply to the letterforms. The external serifs remain and the internal ones were removed.

RH: Oh God, I can imagine them selling that! Unless you write that underneath the logo, it seems ridiculous. It didn’t relate to what Colquhoun and Miller did architecturally. They used a lot of elements of Viennese design from the 1900s with black and square glass, I suppose to be ‘period’.

CW: You carry a lot of idiosyncracies from one client to the next: big indents, multiple alignments on a single plane and the extracting of many colours out of few prints being just three examples. You can tell ‘It’s a Hollis’, can’t you?

RH: That’s bad. Hitchcock said ‘self-plagiarism is style’, but you can carry it a bit far. Because of typefaces you’re happy with, and certain ways of putting things together, it does become a sort of style. It’s not conscious. The atmosphere of the client influences the way you treat something. The Crafts Council work is crisp and open in a different way to the Whitechapel. The Crafts Council actually had a technical aspect. Slightly hi-tech and late Modernist. Spare and mechanical.

Naturally pedagogic

CW: Graphic Design – A Concise History wasn’t published until 1994, yet the acknowledgment says the book originated in the 1960s.

RH: I’d been commissioned to write a general graphic design book, part of which was historical. But my life was in such chaos back then that I abandoned it. Then in the late 1980s Philip Thompson [co-author of Art Without Boundaries] had been writing the concise history for Thames and Hudson, but he’d given up after a bad report. What they’d said was right: he was only interested in the visual side of artists’ design. So I said I’d write it. Thompson had collected some wonderful material, some of which I was able to use, but I started again, with a very different synopsis. But I’d otherwise never have written it.

I went through design annuals, listing common elements in old designs. You’d take every element – say, cloud shapes – and put a mark against every time it was repeated. You could build a very good idea of the visual language of any given time, and see what had been exactly the same 40 years earlier.

CW: Did you select work mainly on the basis of its later influence?

RH: It came down to whether something changed at the time a piece of work was produced, and whether the work was part of that change. It was instinctive – there was very little that was rational about it. But you could see that there were movements or tendencies, so you tried to find things that illustrated that tendency.

CW: How did you decide whom to leave out?

RH: I didn’t – as people say, they were ‘below my radar’. There are very good designers whom I left out. The worrying thing is that you only find out about designers whose work has already been promoted, so the canon is built in a rather depressing way.

CW: The book is divided into national tendencies. Is it healthy for countries to have their own graphic customs?

RH: I think they reflect how relationships really are. The Swiss style didn’t go to Germany – only to the smallest degree. It was more influential in America.

CW: How did you feel about writing the updated chapter on the 1990s for the 2001 edition?

RH: Very difficult, because you have no hindsight as to how these people have fitted into history. Their work – and often the content – was also very outside of my own aesthetic interests: Nike and so on. I could see what other people might find interesting about it, but it was difficult to write. I couldn’t ‘see’ it.

CW: Because it wasn’t history yet?

RH: That’s right. And design had become very self-regarding. Those who made a definite personal style, such as Keedy or Carson, started out with a little idea that was quite interesting but somehow led to a whole school of followers.

CW: Doesn’t that always happen?

RH: The Swiss style was applicable to a whole range of situations. You couldn’t apply the Keedy style to a brochure about nuts and bolts; it was very limited. It talked about itself, about graphics, not the content, and it was that that rather got up my nose. Carson was slightly different – he was more like Brody, in that his content was style culture anyway.

CW: Your latest book is Swiss Graphic Design. How does it compare with Concise History?

RH: It’s much more detailed, and has more statements by the designers. Most of the work shown in Concise History is well known, whereas a lot of this work has never been reproduced before. There are some outstanding designers who have been forgotten. Hermann Eidenbenz, for example, deserves a book of his own.

CW: Did you have an agenda to unearth forgotten designers?

RH: No, but I’m naturally pedagogic; I’d like people to understand that there are systems behind this work. Swiss design has been to some extent misunderstood as ‘just a style’, but it’s how it came from, where it came from that matters.

CW: The concept of Swiss design as dynamic asymmetry and Akzidenz Grotesk is a cliché; your book reveals just how little of it was like that.

RH: [Typographer] Paul Barnes, looking through the material, said: ‘What is amazing is that the stuff from before the First World War is more interesting, and what people imitate is not terribly interesting work.’ It was much more free before the war.

CW: When I read the rough draft, I was surprised by the way it began. You describe how it felt to arrive at Zurich’s main station in the midst of Müller-Brockmann’s panoramic advertising display for Turmac cigarettes. That seemed to make the book more subjective, but also more real in that it states that you were there.

RH: It’s also that I’ve known many of the people, which wasn’t true of Concise History. It’s partly a snobbery: I knew these people and their work, so I could pass on this information. In practice I couldn’t return to that first-person style later, which I’d have liked to.

The three graphic languages

CW: If you were starting out now, would you still choose to be a designer?

RH: I’d do something else. Not because of feelings about design, but because the world and technology have changed so completely. I started out with the idea of not doing anything in particular, or of ‘total’ design. With theatre design for Kidderminster Rep I could lay out the programme, design and paint the sets, and have a walk-on part – that integrated activity really interested me. There were so many funny little jobs around in [mockney accent] ‘the old days’. The BBC showed trailer cards, and anyone who was at the Central could make 9 x 12-inch cards with foil blocking or Letraset, and then see them on television that evening, which was wonderfully direct. My generation used many more different media. I wasn’t typecast when I was younger, but have been in the last few years.

Another problem is that what’s on the screen isn’t what’s on the paper. Backing-up pages, making sequences, or just folding things – the initial design process has suffered. Processes were so much slower.

CW: And you miss that?

RH: Very much. It’s the pleasure in slowly crafting together something which only you could do. A whole play would go by on the radio while you did one side of a news-sheet, because of all the pasting-up and nicking-over of line-endings. The speed of it on a computer is unappealing. You make much worse decisions because you can make them quickly.

CW: Finally, given that you’ve criticised Eye’s design in the past [see Dot Dot Dot no. 1, Spring 2000], how would you like them to lay out this article?

RH: [Laughs] Only so the captions are near the pictures. I can never find things when they group the captions as a long list. I’ve criticised Neue Grafik for the same reason. Max Bill deviated from it when he laid out his article there [no. 2, July 1959], because he could see it was unclear. And there it was complicated by having several languages. I suspect that that’s also how it started in Eye: they’ve never forgotten that it used to be trilingual. But it’s not any more, except for the three graphic languages: good, bad and frightful.

First published in Eye no. 59 vol. 15, Spring 2006.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions, back issues and single copies of the latest issue.