Alan Kitching and Monotype: Celebrating Five Pioneers of the Poster

photo: Phil Sayer

You originally showed this exhibition in 2014. Where did the concept come from?
In 2013 I was invited to New York by Monotype and Eye Magazine as part of a week of seminars, talks and things, and Monotype asked me to participate in one of their publications. I told them that I don’t do books but I’d do a series of sheets folded up into a slip case, and they agreed to that. Naomi Games, the daughter of English poster artist Abram Games, had written about her father extensively, and in one of her books the very first sentence said that when he was born, in 1914, there were four other designers born in the same time: Paul Rand in America, Josef Müller-Brockmann in Switzerland, Tom Eckersley in Britain, and FHK Henrion in Germany.

So, for the Monotype publication – 2014, when we published this series, it was their centenary – I invented five monograms based on their initials to go on the sheets, and this is where the idea for the exhibition came from. Although they were all graphic designers, they all did very different work and I based the monographs on their style of design. On the other side of the sheets was a little biography, and that’s also part of the exhibition. The rest of the exhibition is the work that these five guys did – posters, books and whatever to show the background of what they did and where they came from, to make more sense of my monograms.

I assume you were aware of all their work prior to this commission coming about…
Absolutely, they were major graphic designers of the twentieth century. I didn’t know them that personally because they were a generation above me, but I met them and chatted to them and knew them on a certain level.

Was it difficult to create work inspired by them, as individuals who you look up to? Were you more critical of what you were producing than you normally would be?
The monograms are totally fictitious, something I thought was an interesting image out of their initials. I had to look at their work again and not ape it or copy it in any way, just grasp the essence of it somehow.

Have you had any feedback from their relatives or colleagues?
Naomi helped with the Abram Games one with the early bits, she made suggestions, and with the Paul Rand one as well because he was good friends with Abram – there was a strong family link. Daniel Chehade designed the back of the pack and the biographies, he did all the typography for that. This publication was really a combination of efforts from myself, Daniel and Naomi.

Graphic design, and typography – like all art, goes through fashions. Do you have a favourite period?
Rand, Eckersley and Games and so on, they were artist designers, if you like. And it changed, the whole thing got more commercial, so by the time the sixties arrived, new designers came along. I was brought up in the design of the sixties which was Fletcher Forbes Gill, and Derek Birdsall. They were the hot shot designers when I first came to London – the scene had started to change. Graphic design wasn’t what it is now. The clients were different, they were more of a commodity and used in corporate ways. Now it’s almost come to its conclusion, but then it was still in an embryonic stage. There were very individual styles, you could recognise their work, it had a very distinctive touch to it whereas nowadays it’s very difficult to know immediately who’s done a piece.

I guess it’s in part down to globalisation and digitalisation…
That’s the word, globalisation. In those days globalisation hadn’t even been thought about even though there was an international scene going on – they were very local, quite isolated really. That spread came about really because of the connections with Alliance Graphique Internationale – a body of people you have to be elected into. It’s international status in graphic design. In the fifties and sixties, to become a member of AGI, that was it, you were the top. The organisation goes on, it’s kind of more democratically spread out, but it’s still tough to get in, you have to have a certain standard. But the AGI originally connected international designers together. It was a kind of club. What you’ve got to bear in mind was that the graphic design scene was changing all the time through these individual people and internationally it got bigger with globalisation, the internet and everything else – it has completely changed the whole thing.

The culture of borrowing removes individuality and work becomes less identifiable because everyone’s borrowing from current and past generations. Is that sad to see or just part of progress?
It’s just the case that it’s another phase of the design business. You still see interesting work about, there’s no question about that. And there’s a lot more of it. There’s less print now, it’s all on screen, people doing blogs and online magazines, it’s a different way of communicating the image. It’s changing all the time and it’s unrecognisable from the fifties and sixties. In those days you were still getting typeset and proofs and paste ups and it was all hand work. That’s unheard of now.

Can you pinpoint what it is in a designer/their work that elevates them to something more than the standard?
It is difficult. The designers I knew – Birdsall, Fletcher, Gill – they were all very well-read people. They were intelligent. Very smart and very bright. That’s the only underpinning thing I can say about them. You have to have a certain amount of intelligence to do design, you have to be well-versed in all sorts of levels of knowledge. The good designers have got that, they can draw on references – they know about music, literature, all sorts of things which they can pull on and make connections with. This shows in people’s work.

Alan Kitching and Monotype: Celebrating Five Pioneers of the Poster, Nottingham Trent University, Bonington Gallery, Saturday 19 September - Friday 23 October 2015, free.

Alan Kitching: A Life in Letterpress will be published by Laurence King Publishing, alongside a retrospective at Somerset House, in Spring 2016.

Bonington Gallery website