Jeff Knowles
Bring back the master craftsman
Design is an activity involving skill by making things. It’s not just about creating something ‘new’, but the repeated performance of a skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it. To find out those ways of ‘knowing’ that you simply feel. Jeff Knowles offers us a refreshing perspective on the practise of graphic design, his longing to just ‘make’ stuff and what it was like spending ten years working at ‘Research Studios’ with Neville Brody.
How much of your process is driven by intuition? How much of it is research/ strategy?
JK: The work we do in the studio is really varied, so it actually varies from job to job, but generally I think it’s three things: there is intuition, research and experience. You tend to call on all these skills naturally though. Each time I do a job I learn something, and that experience guides me with each new job. If you want to be radical though, disregard experience.
If you are doing branding and the like, you tend to rely on research. Proctor & Gamble, for example, use eye-scanners to work out how people scan packaging, and they design their products accordingly. This doesn’t leave much room to do interesting work but the big budgets involved can also make it hard.
It’s great to be optimistic, but you have to be a realist as well. We present the clients with a spectrum, one end is just an inch away from their expectations and the other is pushed to the limit. We hope that by doing this we can at least meet them halfway.
You have said that you were not trained in a strict form of traditional typography. How do you think this has influenced your practise, if at all?
JK: I think that there are two types of people, academics and those that are practically minded. My approach has always been — OK, that’s all great, but now let me have a go. I go by the philosophy ‘Don’t Think Just Do’. I think a metaphor that really sums it up is the one of a striker who has a lot of time on the ball. He thinks too much and then he fumbles. When he goes on intuition he is fast and he scores the goal as if by magic. Design is like this. When you run on instinct, it often works. Personally, I learn a lot more by being on the shop floor, and experiencing things, rather than reading about it. I need to connect directly in order to be a more efficient designer.
I also believe if you get the chance, just try everything. Never say no to a new experience or new way of doing something. It might seem random at the time, but at some point in the future that experience may become invaluable. Trying a piece of work for no reason is worthwhile because at some point in the future it may be applicable for another project.
What is the most significant thing you have learnt working with Neville Brody?
JK: A bit about my background: I studied Graphic Design in Salford, Manchester. I wasn’t taught technical things common to general practise. We were simply given themes in which we could interpret any way we saw fit. Coming straight out of school that kind of open brief terrified me. I felt that in every single thing I did I had to be a pioneer, something that I guess that has stayed with me. When I graduated I headed to London, portfolio in one hand, studio list in the other, Neville Brody’s studio being on that list.
Neville asked me to come back for an interview. He never said my work was good, but simply “interesting”. My own style couldn’t be more different to Brody’s approach as I never aspired to be anything than what I was. Perhaps he saw something in that.
The thing I also learnt from Brody, however, was not to fear anything, including type. As a designer he has no fear, and his approach is never precious. I guess that gave me the courage to just jump in there and do stuff. Because I wasn’t formally trained in the old school of typography, type was seen as simply one of the ingredients that nobody wanted to deal with. We used to put it in a little box in the corner and hope nobody noticed it too much.
He also taught me that there is an opportunity to capture a certain quality when you simply let the chips lay where they fall. He came up with some of his greatest work this way (although sometimes it would be returned by the repro guys and it had been ‘fixed’!). Low-res images, for example, are an obvious no-no today, but it is not something that he would worry about.
The studio practises a kind of free-form designing. Neville doesn’t have the designer’s fear of the blank page. He just begins. The studio as a whole produces a lot of work — just generating stuff until it works.
What do you think is unique about British graphic design?
JK: Well, I guess without blowing our own trumpet too much, British design is viewed as somewhat of a pioneer. What I see as significant is that we always want to do things differently. That translates into some really progressive work.
Neville Brody made his name in the 80’s for his forward-thinking approach to typography and layout.
Does it seem curious to you that Research Studios is now approached by clients such as ‘The Times’ to redesign something as traditional as a newspaper layout?
People think of the Research Studios as a typography studio. What they forget is that it is a graphic design studio. Type does take a leading role, it also looks at what is functional. The designs have to fit the job at hand. For instance The Times had very practical considerations, such as fonts that were condensed enough to fit long headings in, but that were at the same time legible and clear. As part of the project Luke Prowse, working at the studio then, created new typefaces for them, a milestone project considering we were redesigning one of the world’s most well-known fonts. The redesign of the paper was more mechanical than cosmetic, a process which addressed the problems created when they migrated from broadsheet to tabloid. In all it was an extensive project that lasted a year, but it was a very successful result.
And finally, can you describe a moment when a piece of design made you simply ‘feel’ something and what did it make you feel?
JK: With the amount of blogs and design sites available today, design is brought to you, rather than you having to search gems out. On the one hand I’m grateful to be exposed to all this work, but I feel almost saturated by design. I appreciate what I see and often have that ’I wish I’d done that feeling’, but I miss that excitement of discovery. I tend to try and get inspiration, or at least that feeling of discovery from other places — nature, natural history, science, industry etc.
One of the things I’m really missing is the master craftsman element of design. Obviously there is talent and experience, which is important in design, but craftsmanship seems to be rare. I’ve almost got a hunger to try glassblowing, metal work or stone masonry — to learn an established skill, rather than always feeling pressure to invent.
I think the latest piece of design that has made me really have a feeling, is the discovery of Spencerian Script. It was developed in the United States in 1850 by Platt Rogers Spencer, whose name the style bears and who was impressed with the idea that America needed a penmanship style that could be written (unbelievably) quickly, legibly and elegantly to aid in matters of business correspondence as well as personal letter-writing. It started to die out in the 1920s with the advent of the typewriter, thus hasn’t been prolific for a long time, in fact only a few people in the world practise it now. For me, it was an example of something that can only be achieved by becoming a craftsman, by studying and practising an established craft.
