Ken Garland
The original designer for social change
Ken Garland is famous for writing the First Things First manifesto in 1964. The manifesto represents another theme that seemed present the day that I spent with him — a stance against prescriptive ways of doing things. In it he advocates that designers are not just trained for advertising, a position he retains today.
Garland was a student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and graduated in 1954. He then worked as art editor of Design magazine from 1956 to 1962. It was the postwar era and a time of new, exciting, radical and subversive events. Perhaps like a lot of baby boomers, he found it easy to break into the design world:
“My generation happened to be around just at the time when certain people felt the need for us. I guess it looks significant because there were so few of us — there were a dozen at the most who had their fingers on the certain pulse”(1.)
Once he was in, he began to find his own way of being there.
The First Things First manifesto was signed by 22 fellow visual communication designers calling for their skills to be put to worthwhile use.
“We have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise,” it stated. The manifesto argued that “signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals, catalogs, instructional manuals, industrial photography” should have priority over “cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer”.
In the year 2000 the manifesto was re-issued by Adbusters. Garland and his fellow signatories re-stated that their skill and imagination should not be wasted on selling “dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes”. Even after all those years, the profession’s time and energy was used up persuading people to buy things that were “inessential at best”.
Although the re-issue was not openly received by all, it did put the topic of how closely visual communication relates to capitalism back on the agenda. Many people believe you can’t extricate the two, but pictures and symbols are a time-honoured means of expression. They came long before alphabets and scripts were used to share ideas and feelings — but nobody would suggest that written language exists merely to sell.
Throughout his career, Garland has not only critiqued why we do things, but how we do them. He is famous for challenging the idea of the ‘corporate identity’, and refuses to work with multinationals on work of this kind.
I think a corporate identity for a large company is deadening, because it means we’re going to be confronted by identical imagery wherever we look. It’s an affront, and I don’t think we should do it. Now you could say, if something’s going to be everywhere, let me try and find a way in which it’s restrained. Sounds like nonsense though, doesn’t it? (2)
Garland argues that in some countries, Bangladesh for instance, societies do without orthodoxies of graphic information. It is not customary in Bangladesh to use systems such as street signs or house numbers, which means people need to place faith in the community around them: “It’s quite good to rely on people helping people to find your way around”(3.) It’s true that there are so many ways one could do something, and multiple solutions to every problem. So it seems strange that we let corporations govern the constraints in which we create our visual world.
Social issues have always been important to Garland; he is an active political campaigner, writer, teacher, lecturer and photographer. However it should be pointed out that he has always held his clients in utmost regard and has never tried to assert his political leanings in this context:
“Clients were reassured that we had their needs at heart, and were not engaged in some separate agenda of our own. I have to say that too much handwringing about ‘Are we being socially aware?’ hampers the work of the studio. We avoided it, for the most part”.
When I asked about what worried him about design today, two things came to mind. He states that there seems to be no place on earth these days that is not “festooned” by graphic messages. “On a small mountain road in Sikkim, an Indian province that lies between Nepal and Bhutan, on the third highest mountain in the Himalayas, I came across a giant advertisement for Kit Kat, just outside an otherwise charming little town. If I had been driving the car instead of being a passenger I might have run it over”. Garland is also disconcerted by the emphasis on market research today. “Market research and all that jazz gets in the way of imaginative thinking and fresh ideas. It wasn’t like this when I started in the business”(6.)
Garland has had a successful and rewarding career. He has managed to balance a commercial career without compromising his ideals, and has contributed to the field in a substantial way. He has also enjoyed himself: “I unreservedly recommend this career to my successors. It’s such fun!”
Originally published in Poetic Tactics, 2011
- Typography Summer School 2010
- 2–5.ODLING-SMEE, A. (2001) Ken Garland is known for First Things First, but his work is playful and personal as well as political. Eye Magazine.
- 6. This topic is further discussed in this publication in MONA — a metaphor for creativity as a whole.
