What is Anti Design?

Johnathan Barnbrook produced a short animation entitled ‘What is Anti Design?’ for the inaugural Anti Design Festival - held in Shoreditch, London during September 2010. The animation was accompanied by a series of three, A0 posters. These are entitled: What is Anti Design? - Structure, Order & Chaos. (the ‘Structure’ version is featured above). As the titles suggest, the appearance of the posters becomes progressively corrupted throughout the series.

This unconventional and stripped-down work is in stark contrast to the highly stylized typographic work normally associated with Barnbrook. This material was the stand out pieces in the festival gallery. The typeface and use of glyphs appears to mimic the appearance of some sort of digital source code.

The decision to forgo his trademark use of progressive and carefully considered typography and Post Moderrnist structure, instead opting for something which appears to be auto generated by some mindless data console is inspired. To disregard the popular conceptions of ‘good design’ and step forward into a year zero where data appears to self-generate and ‘run free’ is surely at the core of the Anti Design ethos. As the digital codex breaks down and disintegrates, so a new aesthetic is revealed. This glitch and error strewn matrix of glyphs and random codes, hums and clicks, signals the breakdown of outmoded vehicles of communication.

The Anti Design Festival – note the judicious use of the noun ‘anti’, not the adjective – was the brainchild of Neville Brody — the typographer, graphic designer and wannabe enfant terrible of the British design establishment. [1]

The intention was to embrace failure, mismanage expectations, be imprecise, unpolished and raise questions rather than deliver solutions. Big hitters from the radical fringes of communication arts were enlisted. This eight-day chaotic extravaganza of installations, workshops, exhibitions, performances and lectures, ran alongside the established and more mainstream London Design Festival. [2]

Certainly, the concept of ‘anti-design’, ruffled feathers and some interesting points were raised in the commentary that preceded the event. Brody insists that the design has become too comfortable with commerce, and that money has replaced creativity and inspiration. He further asserts that, design has endured a 25 year ‘cultural deep-freeze’. 25 years ago Britain was enduring Thatcherism at it’s union-bashing, yuppie-loving ‘lodsamoney’ zenith. Brody himself was the young designer breaking all the rules with his groundbreaking work for The Face magazines. You sense that Brody, who would have been 19 in 1976, longs for a cultural explosion on a par with punk. [3]

The work exhibited in the Londonewcastle space in Redchurch Street was certainly ‘low-fi’ and markedly un-commercial. Ranging from the insightful Barbrook pieces to the bewildering banal. Some contributors had surely missed the point – Anti Design to them seems to have assumed some sort of confrontational, protest anything, rallying call.

Like many of his contemporaries, Brody has succeeded in constantly re-inventing himself to ensure his work remains relevant fresh & spiky. In fact, one could easily come to the conclusion that the whole ADF exercise is one of pure self-aggrandisement. Certainly the on air bickering of Neville Brody and his contemporary Ben Evans at the London Design Festival, had all the ‘good cop’, ‘bad cop’ sincerity of Simon Cowel & Louis Walsh bad mouthing each other over the latest no-mark loser on any given episode of their tedious talent vacuum TV soap opera.

The fact that such a large scale, non-profit event received the funding in the first place means that you have to speculate about the commercialisation of an event seemingly determined to eschew any notion of corporate accountability.

References:
[1] Davies, J (2010) Profile: Neville Brody Design Week 09/09/10 pp13
[2] Relph-Knight, L (2010) Guide to the Anti Design Festival Design Week. 14/09/10 pp15
[3] Sharratt, C (2010) An Anti-Design for Life [online] Available at: http://www.creativetimes.co.uk/articles/an-anti-design-for-life (accessed 26th September 2010)
http://www.barnbrook.net
Anti Design Manifesto (online) Available at http://antidesignfestival.wordpress.com (accessed 26th September 2010)